


Heart of Stone

by waltzin_atlanta



Category: Kingkiller Chronicles - Patrick Rothfuss
Genre: Elodin's "Craziness"/Mental Health-Type Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Getting to Know Each Other/Slow(ish) Build, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-06-22 05:27:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15574764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzin_atlanta/pseuds/waltzin_atlanta
Summary: Elodin knew the names of things, like Taborlin the Great. But Fela didn’t need to call the wind or escape from a high tower, stripped of her key, coin, and candle. She wasn’t a princess in a faerie story—she did geometry and made sympathy lamps.And so Master Namer wasn’t part of her life at the University, until he was.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m late to the KKC party—I don’t know how I’ve missed these books all of these years. Anyway, this is a happy little story, because we need more of those.
> 
> Also, I know nothing about sculpting, so my apologies to the real artists out there for anything I’ve butchered.

Elodin knew the names of things, and everyone knew that. Some said he had magic powers, like Taborlin the Great—that he could crumble a building into dust or call down lightning from the sky.

Fela wasn’t sure she believed it. Her mother had read her the story of Taborlin the Great many nights when she was a little girl, along with tales about princesses carried off by dragons and faeries that put old kings to sleep for a hundred years. But now that Fela was older, she didn’t know if she believed in that sort of magic anymore. On the other hand, she didn’t _not_ believe in it, but no one had ever broken through the walls of her room with only a word.

Others said Elodin was simply mad—cracked, crazy, completely out of his mind. Fela wasn’t convinced of that, either. He was odd sometimes, there was no doubt about that, the way he walked around with no shoes and a loose grin that showed all of his teeth. Insane, though, seemed something more.

But she had heard none of these things about Elodin when she first came to the University, barely eighteen and newly arrived from Modeg with her uncle. They had rented a set of adjoining rooms at the Golden Pony two days before admissions. Her uncle, who had gotten his guilder years before, spent those two days pointing out the various University buildings to Fela and reminiscing about his classes, but Fela was too nervous to pay much attention.

Her legs trembled as she climbed the stage of an empty theater for admissions, and she laced her fingers together so the masters wouldn’t see them shake. She looked over them in quick succession, nine of them sitting in a half-circle at an immense table. None of them looked friendly, although some seemed unfriendly.

“Name?” asked the man sitting in the middle.

“Fela, Moran’s daughter,” Fela said, her soft words cracking in her dry mouth. “I’m here to apply for the University.”

“Sponsor?”

“Beran—my uncle,” she said. “I have his letter of introduction.”

She walked to the edge of the stage and passed the letter down to the man she assumed was the Chancellor. He broke the seal, skimmed it, then set it aside.

“Very well,” he said. “We have some questions for you. Master Alchemist?”

The man at the far end of the table was mostly unremarkable, apart from skeletal fingers that looked permanently stained.

“Name a substance that is denser in liquid form than solid form.” 

Fela’s throat was so tight it hurt when she swallowed.

“Water, sir.”

Master Alchemist nodded absently.

“And what is the practical effect?”

“Ice floats on water.”

He nodded again, then looked to the man at his left. “Master Arithmetician?”

“List the primary trigonometric functions and their reciprocals.”

“Sine, cosine, and tangent,” Fela answered, feeling more confident. She’d always been good at math, and it was one of her favorite subjects. “Their reciprocal functions are cosecant, secant, and cotangent, in that order.”

She shuffled through the masters one at a time. She tried to remember their names and their faces—Master Kilvin, Master Physicker—but they all blurred together in a nervous whirl. The Chancellor gave her what might have been the hint of a kind smile when he asked her a question in Siaru and she responded in kind, but Master Rhetorician smugly looked her up and down when it was his turn.

She had seen the look often. Her uncle had always encouraged her studies, her mother proud and her father supportive in his distant way. But others had scorned her for being a woman, for attempting to learn the knowledge passed on to men without a second thought. Master Hemme’s look saw through her shirt to her breasts—not salaciously, but in a way that made it clear she had no place at the University because of them. Fela crossed her arms over her chest as hot prickles spread across her face and down the back of her neck. 

“Give an example of an antanaclasis,” he said.

Fela paused. Figures of speech all seemed to have similar names. Antanaclasis—was that the one that crossed in the middle and repeated in reverse?

“‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,’” she said, quoting the example her uncle had used when they went over rhetorical devices. “Or is that a chiasmus?”

“A chiasmus,” Master Hemme said, with a snide look that said she’d proved his point.

The flush on her face flared hotter, but Master Sympathist proved kindly, despite his intimidating appearance. She answered the remaining questions as best she could; she knew most of them, and the ones she didn’t know at all she left alone.

_Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt,_ her uncle had always told her.

Her heart had slowed somewhat and her legs had stopped trembling and were merely weak by the time the questions ceased.

“Thank you,” the Chancellor said. “Allow us a few minutes to work out the details of your tuition.”

Fela relaxed—she had passed, she had been admitted to the University—and then someone cleared their throat. Eight heads swiveled toward the man at the end of the table.

“Master Namer,” said the Chancellor, his voice delicately neutral. “Do you have a question?”

Fela had hardly looked at the last man until then. She had seen him when she first scanned the row of masters, but then all her focus had been on answering their questions, and she hadn’t paid any attention to the young man with dark hair.

He was younger than the other masters, and where they wore their robes with a solemn dignity, his were rumpled. He wasn’t short, but he wasn’t particularly tall. He was handsome, but not in an ostentatious way like the men back home, with their silk shirts and jeweled rings and puffed up chests. Master Namer didn’t draw her eye—it was when she spent a couple of seconds looking at him that she saw the beauty in him.

But she didn’t stare at him for more than a few seconds before his dark eyes looked up from the table to catch hers, and suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. He saw through her. Not the way Master Hemme saw through her shirt to her breasts—Master Namer saw straight to the heart of her.

“Five spades have been played,” he said, and his voice rang out in the hall. For the first time, it felt like a theater, alive with a performance. Fela’s heart started pounding again, sure this was some riddle out of a storybook, like when the locksmith’s apprentice tricked the Keeper of the Door to Beyond. “You have three spades in your hand. How many spades is that?”

The other masters looked exasperated. Master Hemme’s face tightened with disdain as he exchanged a look with Master Arithmetician, and bearded Master Artificer sighed audibly.

Fela paused. She hadn’t known how to answer some of the other masters’ questions, but that was simply not knowing the material. None of the other questions had thrown her off balance like this, and her mind raced through her options. But she couldn’t think of any other answer.

“Eight,” she said, her voice softer than even when she first started. Sure that she was missing something, that the question couldn’t be that simple, she added, “I think.”

Master Hemme chuckled and whispered something to Master Arithmetician, and her cheeks flamed again. She had confirmed their suspicion, that women were too stupid to answer a basic question, too stupid to attend the University.

“You think?” Master Namer said, tilting his head.

Fela realized she was picking at the end of her sleeve and forced herself to stop.

“I’m not sure I understand the question, sir,” she said, feeling small and exposed on the stage. 

She thought something like sympathy might have flitted across the Chancellor’s face. But something else flashed on Master Namer’s, serious and thoughtful.

“Do you know,” he said, his voice again ringing in the quiet, “the nine words that will make a man weep?”

Fela thought for another long moment. Her younger brother had cried inconsolably when she was twelve and her mother had left the house on an errand. But he had fallen out of a tree, and if there were nine words involved, Fela hadn’t heard them. Her father had never cried, that she knew of.

“No,” she said, feeling like she had disappointed him.

But his intense presence dissipated as he gave her a toothy grin, and he was goofy as a child. That was Fela’s first brush with what they called madness, but her attention turned quickly to the Chancellor as the masters talked and set her tuition at three talents and six jots. Warmth flowed back into her legs as she rushed to tell her uncle, and she forgot about Master Namer as they went back to the Golden Pony to celebrate.

She learned about him that same night, as she sat on her new bunk in the women’s section of the Mews with three other female students.

“Hemme is a horse’s ass,” said Devi, whose fierceness seemed to make up for her smallness. “He hates women—he’ll do anything to make a fool out of you in front of his class. And Brandeur’s his lapdog. He’ll go along with Hemme every time if it comes down to a vote.”

“Master Arwyl is strict, but fair,” said Mola, sensible and efficient with her short blond hair and neat clothes. “He won’t try to trick you, but he’ll make sure you don’t mess up with his patients.”

“You’re only saying that because he likes you and asked you to keep working in the Medica,” Devi said. “He’s an old stuffed shirt.”

Mola shook her head, but her smile was half-amused.

“Elxa Dal looks a bit evil, but he’s kind,” said Rhinnon, a third girl with curling brown hair and warm eyes. “And Kilvin is alright, if you don’t let the bearishness scare you away.”

“Lorren will be fine so long as you’re careful with his books. That’s all he cares about,” Mola advised Fela. “The Chancellor doesn’t teach much, because he’s the Chancellor, but he’s nice, and then Mandrag just wants an army of students to work in the alchemy labs for him.”

The three of them nodded. Fela ran through the masters in her head, cataloguing what the other girls had said with her own impressions of them. Then she remembered the young master with the deep eyes and odd questions.

“And Master Namer?” she asked.

All three girls snorted—Rhinnon laughed outright, and Devi rolled her eyes.

“Elodin?” Devi said. “He’s cracked as a china teacup. Completely nuts. They locked him up in the asylum a couple of years ago when he lost it, but he managed to escape. No idea why they let him stay—he doesn’t teach anything.”

“Do you know what he asked me in my admissions yesterday?” Rhinnon said. “He wanted me to explain the difference between dirt and rock dust.”

The other girls laughed.

“He didn’t say a word in mine,” said Mola, “just stared at his pen the whole time, like it would start talking back to him.”

“Completely mad,” Devi said.

More stories trickled down from the older students and were whispered among the new students as Fela started her classes. Elodin had been the youngest Chancellor ever before he went mad. He’d been caught at midnight in the morgue of the Medica. He’d been thrown out of the Horse and Four for getting into a fistfight with a traveling baron.

But for all of the rumors, Fela hardly saw the man himself. He didn’t speak at all in her admissions for her next three terms; he stared at the ceiling for two of them, and then played with a sheet of paper when she started her second year. She wondered if she had disappointed him that first time, but she did well enough with everyone else’s questions, and Lorren sponsored her to E’lir after her second term and Re’lar after her seventh.

Over the next two years, while several of her fellow students tried to cajole and coerce Elodin into teaching them naming, Fela caught only glimpses of Master Namer. She stepped around him one morning when he went on to spend the entire afternoon sitting crosslegged in the middle of the busy walkway between Mains and Hollows. She looked up as she walked to the Mess with Rhinnon and saw him perched in a tree.

Other students chased magic and the fame of old heroes, like Taborlin the Great. But Fela had learned that the magic in storybooks was just sympathy and sygaldry: rules and runes and strategically kept secrets, not wizardry. And so Fela didn’t waste time with aspirations of grandeur. While Devi claimed that she was a better sympathist than any man at the University, and that one day, she would prove it, Fela spent quiet afternoons working in the Archives. While Mola spent all of her spare time in the Medica and planned to take Arwyl’s place as Master Physicker one day, Fela was satisfied with early mornings in the Fishery. And if Master Namer seemed, at least in passing, as odd as everyone said, it was no matter to Fela—she hadn’t come to the University to learn faerie magic.

So it was to her surprise when Elodin stepped into her tranquil world at the Fishery one morning.

“Good God, boy, open the fume hood before you suffocate yourself.”

Fela looked across the workroom and saw Elodin pointing his fingers at Basil. Basil looked irked as he fiddled with the ventilator; Elodin, on the other hand, looked entirely out of place in the Fishery. Instead of his master’s robes, he wore a white shirt and pants cut off at the shins. From the way loose threads frayed and straggled down, Fela guessed he had sheared them off himself rather than going to a seamstress.

Basil mumbled something, and Fela turned back to her workstation. She carefully laid out the metal plates and pieces of glass to make two identical sympathy lamps. She decanted a small vial of bone tar to dope her emitters, then nearly dropped the vial and burned her hand when Elodin cleared his throat from behind her. He had crossed to her workstation almost silently, despite wearing a pair of shoes that looked a few steps away from falling apart.

“Sympathy lamp?” he said, and Fela turned around, taking care that the vial of bone tar wouldn’t spill over onto her hand. She nodded. “To light two young lovers’ carriage on a moonless night?”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, “but it’ll light well enough.”

He looked at the sets of twin parts with an intensity that belied his strange words. He stared at the metal plates like he was reading the sygaldry Fela hadn’t scratched in yet. Then he gave her that loose grin she’d seen in her admissions interview.

“Did you spill shit on Kilvin’s floor?”

“What?” Her hands clutched tighter around the vial of bone tar.

“You’re a Re’lar, right? Lorren sponsored you three terms ago? How come you’re not doing something more interesting than sympathy lamps?”

She set the bone tar back on her workstation, then turned back to him. She did other, more complicated projects, and while sympathy lamps were simple, she enjoyed them. Her hands knew how the pieces fit together and fell into a rhythm that was relaxing—soothing, even.

“I—” Fela faltered. Feeling silly, she said, “I like them.”

“Like doing the same thing over and over, like a tinker’s donkey?”

Elodin lowered his head and slapped his hands alternately against his knees, like a donkey plodding along with a heavy cart.

Fela stiffened, but hesitated before responding sharply. If he was as unpredictable as they said—and it certainly seemed that way—there was no point in arguing with him. She wasn’t trying to impress him; she didn’t need him to teach her faerie magic, if that sort of magic was even real. Besides, Kilvin liked her sympathy lamps just fine.

She held up the schema.

“It’s the same design, yes, but every lamp is different. Not in the way it’s designed, but the way it fits together.” She held up the two metal plates, one for each lamp. “These are both hemispheres, but this one doesn’t curve as sharply. I had to shape the glass a little differently so it would fit tight enough.”

Elodin had stopped fidgeting. Instead of looking at her like she was a tinker’s donkey, he looked at her like she was a talking, flying donkey. Feeling self-conscious, Fela went on.

She picked up the two pieces of blue glass.

“These pieces of glass are cut from the same sheet, maybe even right next to each other, but they’re not the same color.”

“They’re both blue,” he said. “Blue, blue, blue.”

She nodded, then held them up to the light.

“Yes. But this one is thinner,” she said, gesturing to the one in her right hand. “It was thicker on one end to begin with, so I had to grind off more to make it even. It will be a lighter blue than the other. And the other one has little bubbles in it—see?” She offered it to him, and he held it like it was a ruby or a gold necklace. “The bubbles will distort the light a little. So it’s the same design, but they’re not the same lamps at all.”

It was one of the things she liked best about working in the Fishery: the cool metal under her fingers, the smoothness of glass, the intricacies of multiple wires. There was something calming about learning the uniqueness of each piece, something satisfying about finding the way to make each individual part fit perfectly. It wasn’t as dramatic as the alchemy labs, where concoctions fizzed and reacted in mysterious ways, or as high-pressure as the Medica when someone was brought in with a gaping wound. These mornings in the Fishery were simple and methodical, and they were enough for Fela.

Elodin stared at the glass in his hands for so long, she wondered if this was another display of madness. But when he finally looked up at her, his gaze was quite sane, if intense.

“Do you do anything else?” he asked her. “Do you draw or paint or carve?”

“I sculpt,” Fela said, confused by the sudden turn of the conversation. “Not very well, most of the time.”

He looked at her, his eyes so focused she could hardly meet them. Then something in him changed, and the loose grin was back.

“Sculpting is for the sexually repressed. Sculptors spend all of their time diddling with private parts.”

He gestured obscenely at his chest, mimicking shaping breasts. Then he spun the glass in his fingers, and Fela tensed, ready to reach for it if it fell. But Elodin didn’t drop it; he placed it back on her workstation next to the metal plates, then headed out of the Fishery, the stray threads of his sheared off pants blowing around his bare calves.

Fela turned back to the pieces of her sympathy lamps. She brushed a piece of hair back behind her ear before she picked up the emitter. Based on her first real conversation with Master Elodin, he was quite as cracked as everyone said.

* * *

He came back to the Fishery a couple of spans later, although it took Fela a few moments to recognize him behind the large block he was carrying. A white sheet hung over it and down past his knees, so that the dilapidated shoes underneath gave him away.

Elodin set the covered block on her workstation with a loud thud, then turned to her and gave a stately bow.

“For Fela, shaper of men’s marble balls,” he said.

She frowned at the crude title, then frowned deeper as she processed the rest of what he’d said. She hadn’t realized he knew her name.

He pulled off the sheet with a flourish.

Underneath was a block of marble. Fela saw that it was very fine: a rich grey with a uniform pattern, much finer than than the marble Kilvin allowed Re’lars to use. She wondered whether Elodin had bought it, or if he had stolen it from Kilvin’s private storage and she would get in trouble for having it at her workstation.

She reached out and ran her fingers over it. It was smooth, with no cracks or hitches.

“I am here to commission a sculpture,” Elodin said, leaning toward her. “I want you to make me—” his voice rang impressively, like he was an oracle in a faerie story, setting her on a quest “—a whistle in the wind,” he finished dramatically.

Fela stared at him.

She opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t how sculpting worked, that it would be a waste of very good marble—but then she stopped. If he was as mad as she was coming to believe, disagreeing with him would get her nowhere. He was a master, and it wasn’t her marble, after all.

“Okay,” she said instead with a shrug.

The intense look flashed back across his face and was gone just as quickly. He slapped the marble with the flat of his hand and said, “And I want it tickling the hair on a farmer’s balls,” and then left the Fishery.

 

Fela didn’t touch the marble for nearly a span. She spent five days trying to decide how to sculpt a whistle in the wind. She tried to envision it in her head, tried to sketch it, tried to model it out of clay. When that didn’t work, she set the block aside for another four days and worked on sympathy lamps instead, hoping that inspiration would come.

It didn’t.

So on the tenth day, worried that Elodin would come back and find his marble untouched, Fela sighed and picked up a mallet and chisel. She would just have to figure it out as she went along. 

“This is absurd,” she said to herself. “He’s clearly been touched in the head.”

She didn’t know what a whistle in the wind looked like, but she was sure it wasn’t a square block, so she started chipping at one corner to break off large chunks. She felt stupid, working at the block with no plan whatsoever. She was going to waste the nicest bit of marble she’d touched since she’d left her parents’ fountain garden.

But after a few minutes, her hands relaxed around the tools and fell into a rhythm. Her eyes softened until she saw the basic shape of the marble only vaguely; she didn’t look at it critically, and her hands found the places to strike without conscious thought. It was peaceful, in a way.

“—keep the lid on the canister, Basil,” Kilvin’s deep voice rumbled, and Fela startled and dropped the mallet. She heard Basil’s mumbled response, and she looked around to see the two of them walking across the workroom. 

Then she looked down at her marble and almost gasped in surprise.

There was a whistle in the wind. Not the way she had tried to sketch it or mold it with clay, or even how she would imagine it—but when she looked, it was the wind, and it was whistling. She scanned over the lines of it, clever and sleek in a way she hadn’t consciously pictured, then noticed she had chipped off a piece on one side when Kilvin startled her. The pang of disappointment wasn’t enough to dampen her surprise that she had actually shaped it.

As she sanded it smooth, she thought about trying to find Elodin, then remembered the ridiculous lengths other students had gone to track him down. So she left it on her workstation, a marble whistle in the wind.

 

Elodin was at her workstation a few days later, trailing a finger over the sculpture, when Fela came in to the Fishery at dawn. 

“This is very good, Fela,” he said with his back to her.

“I messed up one side,” she said, as Elodin touched the chip. “I got distracted, and my chisel must have slipped.”

He ran his hands over it for a few more seconds, as though his fingertips were a second set of eyes.

“Where’s your plan?” he asked. “Your sketches, your models?”

“I didn’t have any,” she said, embarrassed at her unconventional methods. How could she explain that it wasn’t like artificing, with careful instructions and schemas and precise measurements? Feeling foolish, she added, “I . . . I felt it.”

He turned around and looked at her as intently as he’d examined the sculpture.

“Hmm,” he said.

Then he picked up the marble and left.

He brought her three more slabs of marble, each as fine as the last. He told her to make a cube with eight sides, the sound of a dry riverbed, and water vapor condensing into a raindrop.

The next ones were easier than the first, if only because Fela knew it could be done. Like the whistle in the wind, she didn’t try to analyze it, didn’t try to sketch it. She just let her hands find the shape in the marble.

It was relaxing, in some way. It was freer than the sympathy lamps, more creative than the other designs she made for Kilvin. She came to enjoy mornings in this state, even, and when Elodin came back the fourth time, she proudly showed him the raindrop. It was her best sculpture yet, the reflection so multifaceted she didn’t know how she had done it.

When he finished running his fingers over it, he turned to her with an unsettling light in his eyes.

“Fela,” he said. “Fela with the magic hands, lady of the tools.”

He sounded like he was summoning her out of a storybook, although the grass stains all over his white shirt ruined the effect somewhat.

“Would you like to learn,” he said, leaning toward her like he was telling her a secret, “the storied art of naming?”

It rang impressively in the air, and even if the faerie stories weren’t true, Fela almost expected something to happen—for the wind to howl through the Fishery or the glass jars to rattle around them.

Nothing did, of course. It wasn’t a storybook, after all—although she wasn’t sure why he was asking _her,_ of all people. She wasn’t smart: not like Uresh, who could solve differential equations in a couple of lines, or Kvothe, who had been promoted to E’lir in three days. She was smart enough—she’d gotten into the University, after all, and gotten good marks in her classes—but she worked for it. It was all from long hours in the Archives, going to the masters’ offices after class, comparing her work with the other students’.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve heard naming’s dangerous. People . . . go mad.”

_Like you_ , she didn’t say, looking at his clothes, already freshly stained in the early morning.

Elodin scoffed and waved his hand dismissively.

“People go mad in the Fishery,” he said. “Or in the alchemy labs.”

“That’s different,” Fela said. “You can plan for that. Accidents happen and people make mistakes, but there are formulas and rules. You can avoid things going wrong if you’re careful.”

“Pssh. Don’t you want to learn how to call a star down from the sky?” he asked, with a sweeping gesture that would have been more impressive if there wasn’t a slit in his sleeve from his wrist to his elbow. “How to turn rocks into dust? The name of the wind?”

“But those are faerie stories,” she said.

“Are they?” He raised an eyebrow. “Where do you think the faerie stories come from?”

“I do geometry and make sympathy lamps,” Fela said. “I came to the University to learn higher maths, not be a princess in a storybook.”

“And Fela with her heart of stone found herself locked in a high tower,”Elodin said, his voice filling the Fishery. The few students who were there this early turned to look curiously. “They had taken her sword and stripped her of her tools: key, coin, and candle. But Fela knew the names of all things, and so all things were hers to command.” 

Fela tried a different tack, eager to cut him off before the other students started paying more attention. 

“Naming seems . . . impractical,” she said, struggling for a polite way to say it. “Unpredictable. Sygaldry, alchemy, mathematics—they make sense. They do things: they make light, they cure illnesses. Why do I need the name of the wind?”

“Why do we need the moon in the sky?” Elodin asked.

His laugh made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. That disconcertingly loose smile was back; then he grabbed the raindrop sculpture and carried it toward the door, pushing past a student who stared at him in sleepy surprise.

Fela wasn’t sure if she had agreed to learn naming or not—but she was becoming more and more convinced that, rumors of magic powers aside, Master Namer was quite mad.


	2. Chapter 2

Apparently, Fela _had_ agreed to learn naming.

Nearly two spans passed before her lessons started. By then, she’d forgotten—and back when she still remembered, she’d assumed Elodin had forgotten, if his offer was even sincere to begin with.

She’d gone to bed as usual, leaving the window cracked open. She’d paid three full talents for her own room before her fifth term, after Devi had been expelled and Rhinnon went back home and Mola was the only one left of the three girls she’d first bunked with. The view left something to be desired—rather than overlooking the courtyard, her room looked out over the roofing tiles of the circular hub of the Mews. Even so, the luxury of having her own room meant Fela could forgo her nightgown in the warm summer nights.

An insistent tapping on her window woke her up. Disoriented in the dark, she turned on the lamp by her beside.

Elodin was outside her window. He had apparently climbed the roof of the main building, then come to the women’s wing.

Fela yanked the sheet up to cover herself.

“Tehlu’s breath,” she muttered. Sleepy, angry, and confused, she pulled the sheet from her bed to wrap around herself as she slid her window the rest of the way open.

“Hurry up, Fela, we don’t have all night,” Elodin said, giving no indication that he might have seen her naked, or that it was odd to tap on someone’s window past midnight.

“What?” She had no idea what he was talking about. She pulled the sheet up higher to make sure it covered her chest.

“To find the names of all things.”

It came back to her—the raindrop sculpture, the Fishery, naming lessons.

“Now?” she asked.

“When better?”

_In the morning,_ Fela almost said. In the afternoon, when she was awake, or before dinner, or almost any time other than right now.

“Let me get dressed,” she said instead. “I’ll meet you by the back door.”

She wasn’t sure why she agreed. He was a master, after all—though she couldn’t imagine Lorren or Mandrag rapping on her window in the middle of the night. She shut the window, not awake enough to care if she’d closed it in his face, then turned off the lamp. She banged her knee on her dresser in the dark and spent an extra minute feeling to make sure she’d put her shirt on the correct way, but that seemed safer than the possibility of him watching her get dressed through the backlit window.

The hallways of the women’s wing were deserted at this time of night. Outside, Elodin sat on the stairs, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at the sky. He hummed a little, just to himself, so quietly it could have been part of the night.

“Let’s go,” he said, as if they were going for a normal daytime stroll across the courtyard.

“Where are we going?” she asked, following a few strides behind him.

“To chase the wind.”

They walked across the courtyard, past the Archives, past Mains. The University looked forbidding in the night, lit only by sympathy lamps along the walkways. They passed Hollows and kept going through town, past pubs that were dark except for a few windows in the upper stories. Fela was sure her hair was a mess from where she hadn’t turned the light on to look in the mirror, but no one passed them on the streets.

They were on a narrow stone road before she noticed Elodin wasn’t wearing shoes. He had rolled up his pants and left his shirt loose around his neck. If the rough stones of the road bothered him, he didn’t say.

They walked in silence, apart from Elodin’s humming. Questions circled in Fela’s mind, sleepy and half-formed and unspoken. But when the stone road turned to a narrow dirt one she didn’t recognize and she judged they had walked nearly two miles, she started to consider turning back.

“How much farther?” she asked.

“To the end of the road,” Elodin said unhelpfully, as Fela had no idea how far that was.

At one point, he snagged the fabric at her elbow and pulled her off into the woods. Fela’s heart hammered in her chest—bandits didn’t usually bother the University, but she’d heard the stories. But when minutes passed and nothing came down the road, her fear turned to annoyance. Elodin didn’t explain as he pushed his way through the brush back to the dirt path.

After another mile or so, the cadence of their feet and Elodin’s soft humming lulled her back into a waking trance, and she blinked when Elodin stopped.

“Here we are,” he said with a grand gesture.

They stood on the lip of a quarry: below them, tall steps descended some fifty feet. Rusted skeletons of excavating equipment littered the bottom. The light of the half-moon turned the pit into an eerie graveyard.

“Where are we?” Fela asked.

Elodin started walking down a narrow trail that took them past the ledges hewn into the stone. Fela tried not to trip on the faint path as she followed him to the bottom.

“Once upon a time,” Elodin said as he walked. His voice, pitched low, filled the empty night and echoed off the walls of the quarry. “Before there was even a University, there was an old king. His people loved him, and he ruled for many years and protected them from evils that no longer walk the world openly. When the king died, his people buried him deep, and filled his tomb with treasure as a sign of respect.”

The trail looped back, halfway to the bottom.

“Later,” Elodin continued, “much later—hundreds of years, a thousand years—the University was built and the town grew around it. Workers came here to quarry the stone and sell it to the Arcanum or the artists in Imre. They ran a prosperous business, until one day, their tools struck the grave of the old king.”

They’d reached the bottom of the pit. The abandoned equipment was even older than Fela had thought—the wood had long rotted away, and the once-sharp metal points had dulled and flecked off.

“They dug him up, of course,” Elodin said. “Along with magnificent jewels, old vases, chests that wouldn’t open. History beyond imagining—Lorren would shit himself if he got his hands on some of those things. And then, one day, the workers were all dead. An errand boy came to the quarry and found them all horrendously butchered, their equipment destroyed, and all of the jewels gone and the grave empty.”

“Who killed them?” Fela asked, interested despite herself. “Robbers after the treasure?”

“I have no idea,” Elodin said. “I saw a play about it once and was too drunk to stay awake through the last act.”

Her annoyance flared back up.

“What are we doing here?” she asked next.

“Ah, now that’s a better question,” he said. “We’re finding the king’s tomb.”

He’d hauled her out of bed in the middle of the night to chase some stupid faerie story, something he’d heard once in a play. Who knew why the workers had really abandoned the quarry? For all Fela knew, they’d simply finished extracting the good-quality rock—and there had probably never been a king buried here at all.

But there was no use trying to reason with Elodin. He hoisted himself up to sit on the bottom ledge, his bare feet hanging down over the sheer side of rock.

“Well, go on,” he said, motioning toward the open pit.

Fela sighed. This was completely pointless; if they were really searching for the king’s grave, they would bring loden stones to search out metals, or explosives to blast the rock. They wouldn’t wander blindly in the half-light. That only worked in storybooks, spirits coming out at the right phase of the moon.

She stepped around the bones of the equipment, crawled up a ledge, tapped on a stretch of rock to see if it was hollow. She didn’t find anything—the quarry was fifty feet deep and twice as long, and the king’s grave could have been anywhere, if it was even real. After ten minutes, she came back to where Elodin was sitting and hauled herself up next to him, hoping her search had satisfied him. He didn’t even seem to notice she was there.

In the dark and quiet, Fela’s mind drifted back toward sleep. Her eyes, half-closed, wandered to a ledge across the way, about halfway down the wall of the quarry. It looked just like the stretch of rock above and beneath it, but there was something about the way it caught the light—maybe a trick of the moon, maybe a shimmer in the wind.

Fela sat up, blinking and shaking her head. When she looked again, it was a normal stretch of rock, the same grey as the rest of the pit.

“Did you see something?” Elodin asked. She’d thought he might have fallen asleep.

“No.” Then she pointed up and across the quarry. Beside her, Elodin shifted, brushing her side. “I thought I saw something over there, about halfway up the side. It must have been a trick of the light.”

“It’s the king’s tomb,” Elodin said quietly. “They sealed it up after they realized who had killed the workers, hoping the murderers would never come back. But they should have known it was the history they wanted to keep secret, not the treasure.”

“I thought you said you’d fallen asleep before the last act.”

“I did.”

Fela didn’t bother to point out the contradiction. The more she thought about it, the more sure she became that she hadn’t seen _anything_ up there. She had probably just been falling asleep.

They sat for another half hour, and Fela’s fingers tapped the stone in growing irritation. When dawn hinted over the horizon, Elodin hopped down off the ledge. She followed him more cautiously.

The walk back to the University was worse than the walk there, now that she was fully awake and annoyed. At least now she recognized markers as they got closer: when the dirt road turned to stone, when they reached the outskirts of town, when they passed bakeries with their lights on.

Thankfully, Elodin didn’t try to make her climb the roof to her window, and instead left her at the back door of the Mews. She debated whether she should try to go back to sleep or just head to the Fishery early. Either way, she would be tired for her Linear Algebra class that afternoon.

“Good morning, Fela,” Elodin said, and then he vanished as suddenly as he had appeared at her window.

* * *

He tracked her down every couple of spans as term ended and the next one began, and his “lessons” grew stranger and stranger. Fela admitted that something unusual had happened when she sculpted the whistle in the wind, even if it had seemed impossible at first. And maybe she had seen something, just for a second, half-asleep at the quarry, although that might have been a dream.

But when Elodin told her to put wet clay in her shoes and wear them for the rest of the day, nothing happened. She squelched around the University for the first few hours, the clay gritty between her toes as she worried she would drip sludge all through the Archives and anger Lorren. Then it dried, tight and uncomfortable around her feet, and cracked as she walked. At the end of the day, she resigned her shoes to being ruined.

“What did you learn?” Elodin asked her, when he passed her by chance the next day walking to Hollows.

“That wet clay is uncomfortable, but dry clay is even worse,” Fela said.

He just laughed when she scowled at him.

He had her read what he said was a book of Yllish poetry, although the knots meant nothing to her. He had her hold her breath until she thought she would pass out, then stare at a pile of rocks while she gasped for air. He told her to go to Mains at the noon bell and sit naked on the front steps until dinner.

“No,” she said flatly to that one, not caring if she had openly disagreed with a master.

He raised an eyebrow at her. It could have been lewd, or it could have been cracked.

After that, he stopped finding her—she assumed he had grown bored with whatever game he was playing. And Fela had other things to think about: a gift to thank Kvothe for saving her from the fire in the Fishery, the way he tensed under her hands when she draped his new cloak around his shoulders. The way the green fabric brought out the green of his eyes and the red of his hair, like fire on a tree or a scarlet butterfly on a bush. She didn’t have a knack for poetry—she did geometry and made sympathy lamps.

Then there were mornings in the Fishery and afternoons working as a scriv, so she’d nearly forgotten about naming lessons with Elodin when he came to the desk of the Archives a few days before admissions.

“Master Elodin,” she said.

“Re’lar Fela,” he said, inclining his head.

She’d never seen him in the Archives. He had a private library, like all of the other masters. To her knowledge, though, no one pulled books for his collection, the way she sometimes did for Mandrag. In fact, judging by the dust under the door and the way the lock had rusted shut, Elodin hadn’t ever been in there.

She’d heard that a scriv had caught him naked in the Archives once, and she was profoundly grateful that he was wearing clothes, even if they had collected pieces of grass.

“Are you looking for Stacks?” Fela asked, when twenty seconds had passed and he said nothing. It was a stupid question—the door behind her was clearly labeled “Stacks”—but with Elodin, it was hard to tell.

“No,” he said, and she felt even more stupid. “I am looking for you.”

“Oh.”

“I am teaching a class this term,” he said. “I would like you to come.”

She hadn’t expected that—to her knowledge, he had never taught anything since she’d started at the University. She ran through her courses in her head: chemistry, alchemy, math, working in the Archives and the Fishery. She had room for one more class, even if naming wasn’t something she was interested in.

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“The name of the class is,” Elodin said, lowering his voice, and Fela wondered if this was a University-sanctioned class or something obscene, “the name of the class.”

“Okay,” she said and shrugged.

He smiled at her with all of his teeth, and she tentatively smiled back. Then he passed behind her to the Stacks. He still hadn’t come back out when Fela left the desk four hours later, but on the other hand, she didn’t hear any stories that night in the Mess about finding him naked.

 

Fela thought, since Elodin had given her “lessons” and invited her to join his class, that he might ask her a real question during her admissions interview—something about naming or long-dead kings or faerie stories. She showed up to her interview a day early, having traded her slot with an agitated and emotional Kvothe, and she still felt the blush from when he had called her gorgeous. 

She thought she’d done reasonably well with the eight other masters’ questions, watching them huddle to discuss her tuition. Then Elodin waved his hand.

“Why is the sky blue?” he asked.

The masters sighed, but for once, Fela felt like she some sort of answer for him.

“Light scatters based on its wavelength—the extent that it scatters is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. Because blue light has a shorter wavelength, it scatters more when it hits the atmosphere than other colors with longer wavelengths, like red or yellow,” she said.

Elodin stared at her blankly, and something clicked: she wasn’t answering this for Brandeur, with formulas and calculations. After a moment, Fela realized that she had answered why the light scattering made the sky blue, but not why that particular wavelength turned out to be blue in the first place.

“Why blue, though?” she went on. “I don’t know—it just . . . is.”

She felt very stupid, the way she had in her first interview when she hadn’t heard yet that Elodin was cracked. The way she did in their lessons when he asked her about something she’d done and she had no logical explanation. He hadn’t asked a trick question, not in the way Hemme tried to mess her up—it was just another one of his questions she didn’t quite understand.

But Elodin seemed satisfied with her answer, or at least he smiled at her and didn’t say anything else. They set her tuition at nine talents and three jots, and she left to sign up for classes.

She found her chemistry and alchemy classes easily, and only a few students had signed up for Manifold Maths. Kvothe hadn’t heard anything about Elodin’s class, and as Fela flipped through the ledger, she wondered if it was even real. She searched under Elodin’s name, since she had no idea what the class was called.

She found it on the very last page, freshly written, as though it had been added as an afterthought.

_Introduction to Not Being a Stupid Jackass._

There were no names under it. She sighed and put hers down.

* * *

To her relief, six other people had signed up for Elodin’s class, and her heart turned over a little when one of them was Kvothe. They clustered in the first two rows of the huge lecture hall, wasted with only seven students.

Elodin showed up half an hour late and paced back and forth like a restless animal, and Fela’s hope that he might _really_ teach them disappeared quickly. They spent most of class doing mathematical calculations, of all things, before he assigned them nineteen books to read. She spent hours tracking down seventeen of them, and then hours more going through them, first reading and then just flipping through pages at random. None of them had anything to do with naming.

Her expectations dwindled through the next two spans, when Elodin sometimes didn’t come at all and the rest of them spent an hour and a half playing cards or gossiping. When he spent ten minutes chasing milkweed pods around the classroom, Fela wrote off the subject of naming as no more than a faerie story.

“He’s completely off his nut,” Jarret said after class.

“Totally cracked,” Uresh agreed.

Fela said nothing. She hadn’t joined Elodin’s class to call the lightning like Taborlin the Great, and so she hadn’t been as disappointed as the other students when nearly half the term had passed and Elodin had showed up only a handful of times. Still, she grew certain that her time was better spent with mathematics and artificing and the more sensible subjects at the University, rather than chasing old faerie legends.

 

She called the name of stone the next morning. The early morning light slanted steeply in the Fishery onto her schema and the block of stone she was shaping instead. The marble she’d gotten from Kilvin’s stores, with rough patches and irregular veins, wasn’t nearly as nice as what Elodin had brought her. But even if Elodin’s lessons had led to nothing else, Fela had learned she enjoyed the freeness of working like this.

She chipped at the block in a pattern that seemed random when she stopped to think about it. She slipped into that relaxed state, not asleep but no longer alert, where she went more by feel than thought. Her half-focused eyes watched the marble take the shape of the songbird she had seen that morning on the walk to the Fishery.

And then a word came to her lips, and she said it.

“Oh my God!”

A sharp crack and her own voice snapped her back to alertness. She jumped and dropped the chisel.

“What happened?” Basil asked her across the workroom.

“Nothing,” she said, heart pounding. “I hit my finger with the mallet and dropped the chisel,” she lied.

She looked down at her workstation. The stone around the songbird’s tail feathers had cracked into gravel and dust, and the feathers came through clear as day. They were perfect—smooth and finished, even though she hadn’t sanded them yet. A hundred tiny, precise lines that would have taken Fela hours to painstakingly chip away shaped the feathers’ various vanes and barbs. Even the veins of the marble seemed to enhance the pattern.

Fela’s first thought was to find Elodin, cracked or not. His class didn’t meet for another two days, and she was out the door of the Fishery, the marble bird in her arms, before she realized she had no idea where to find him. Or if he was even awake this early in the morning, if he spent his nights wandering the abandoned quarry.

His office in Hollows was unlocked. It wasn’t surprising that he wasn’t there this early, but judging by the piles of papers strewn across his desk, he never used his office at all. Given that he hadn’t taught a class in her three years at the University, Fela wondered how old this homework was. He had tried to stuff an entire set of _Gast’s Encyclopaedia_ into one of his desk drawers, which wouldn’t close all the way. Lorren would have been scandalized.

The Chancellor was unlocking the door to his office as Fela left Elodin’s.

“Good morning, Fela,” he said, taking in her sculpture with a polite smile and no questions.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “I’m looking for Master Elodin. Do you know where I might find him?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea,” the Chancellor said, with something between sympathy and a grimace. “He wasn’t at the masters’ breakfast this morning, although that is not unusual.”

Elodin wasn’t in the Mess, wasn’t in Mains, wasn’t in the outer sections of the Stacks. Fela thought about checking the Master’s Hall, but even if she had just found the name of stone, going to his private rooms seemed too personal. 

When she crossed back from the courtyard a second time, he had appeared, sitting crosslegged on the grass and reading a book.

“Master Elodin!” she called, hurrying toward him as quickly as she could with the songbird sculpture in her aching arms.

“Fela,” he said, surprised.

“I called the stone!” She set the sculpture on the ground in front of him. “I was in the Fishery this morning, just tapping at the marble, and I felt something in the back of my mind. So I said something—I’m not sure what, I can’t remember now—and there was a crack and all of the stone around his tail feathers fell away.”

Elodin closed his book and looked over her sculpture carefully, like Arwyl examining a patient in the Medica.

“I haven’t sanded it yet,” she said. “It’s still a little rough, other than around his tail where it all came off on its own.”

Elodin ran his fingers over the feathers. He tapped gently on the body. He held it up to his ear for two whole minutes, as if he was listening for something.

Then he put it down on the grass, looked up at her, and smiled.

Like the rest of them, Fela had come to believe that he was mad, and so she had forgotten that he was handsome. Her exhilaration from calling the stone turned the day bright and the wind pleasant and Elodin’s dark eyes into shining warmth—and he was beautiful, like the smooth feathers on her sculpture.

“This is wonderful, Fela,” he said, his voice calm with no hint of madness. “Very impressive. Tell me exactly how it happened.”

“It was when I was letting my hands do all the work, like I started doing with your sculptures—I don’t really think about it, if that makes sense. Then I just felt like I knew something.”

“How were you feeling? Angry, sad, afraid?”

“No, no,” she said. “I was calm. I always feel so calm when I’m working like that. I think that’s why I like it so much.”

“Really?” he said. “Even more impressive.”

Fela’s cheeks warmed with pride, and she looked back down at him, sitting crosslegged with his book in front of him.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Most people find their first name in the height of passion, if you will,” he explained. “When they are angry or in great pain or making lo—well . . . something deep inside them wakes up and sees what their waking mind can’t. Kvothe called the wind last term when that rich little bastard broke his lute.”

Fela nodded. Elodin was halfway through his next sentence before she realized he had called Ambrose a “rich little bastard.”

“After the sleeping mind is woken the first time, it does not go back to sleep quite so deeply,” he went on. “It is easier to wake each time, until eventually, you don’t need rage or emotion to find the names of things.

“But you, Fela, didn’t need anger to call the stone the first time, and that is rare.”

He looked up at her, the way he had looked at her statue—he saw through her, and Fela felt exposed and shy.

“I don’t think there’s much anger in you,” he said finally. “Fela with her heart of stone.”

They fell back into another silence. The sleeping mind and the waking mind—abstract, but they made sense, in a way. Fela supposed she had been using her sleeping mind when she sculpted: her hands knew what to do, but she didn’t, because her sleeping mind had taken over.

And she realized that Elodin had tried to wake her sleeping mind on the trip to the quarry. He had pulled her out of sleep, and she had been nearly asleep when she saw saw the light on that stretch of stone. She _had_ found the king’s tomb, or something, at least—she was sure of it now.

He’d been teaching her all along, with the impossible sculptures and midnight trip. Even the clay in her shoes had been to get her to see things differently, to throw her off balance enough that she stopped analyzing the world logically.

And suddenly, Master Namer seemed not quite so cracked as she had thought. But she had one last question.

“Why stone, though?” she asked. “Kvothe called the wind, and Inyssa is looking for the name of iron.”

“Wind _is_ the more traditional path,” Elodin said, running one hand through the grass. “Many years ago, when naming was more widespread, most students set out to find the name of the wind.”

He kept running his fingers through the grass, feeling the dirt or searching for rocks.

“But as to stone—I expect you know better than we do,” he finished.

“It seemed . . . right,” Fela said. “I can’t explain it. It just . . . fit.”

It was another one of her silly answers, like his questions in her admissions interviews that she couldn’t explain. But maybe that was her sleeping mind.

“It’s because of who you are,” Elodin said. “Think about it.”

“The wind ripples the water in a pool, while stones sink to the bottom?” Fela tried, half joking.

He laughed, and she startled—not in surprise, but at the laugh itself. He laughed sometimes in class, in a manic way that made the hair on her arms prickle. But this laugh was completely lucid, clear and light and so contagious she couldn’t help but smile.

“You are deep, Fela,” he said, and at first she thought he was teasing her about her joke. “Deep like the stone. The wind is always changing, always moving, always searching. It blows from place to place, looking for something, but never staying long enough for it to arrive.”

Kvothe had called the wind, Fela thought. And, as Elodin spoke, she could see the wind in Kvothe. There was a restlessness in him, something wayward—maybe it was his Edema Ruh blood. He was brilliant: he pushed and challenged everything, but it never seemed to be enough. 

“The stone,” Elodin went on, “is unchanging. It stays exactly where it is. Not because it’s dull—because it knows that everything it wants is already within itself. And nothing—wind nor fire nor water—can sway the stone.”

He looked at her again, another look that saw through her. And Fela thought she saw some sense in his words. She didn’t have grand aspirations like the other students of one day being a famous arcanist; she didn’t have a deep passion for anything, like Kvothe and his music. She wasn’t chasing after faerie magic—she had her quiet work in the Archives and the Fishery, and that was enough.

“Did you call the wind first?” Fela asked him. Then she realized that in the context of their conversation, it was a rather personal question.

He laughed again, as lucidly as the first time, but it didn’t ring quite as free.

“Yes,” he said. “I was fourteen and Elxa Dal said I was too hotheaded to learn advanced bindings. I was so angry I called the wind and flared up his braziers and singed his robes.”

Fela laughed at his rueful expression, then thought back to what he’d said about the wind. Kvothe had called the wind, and she saw the restiveness in him. But now she looked at Elodin. Was he never satisfied, always searching? The words were on the tip of her tongue— _What are you looking for?_ —but she realized they were far too personal and didn’t speak them.

She looked down to where Elodin was weaving his fingers through the grass. To anyone else, it would have looked like one more of Master Namer’s eccentricities. But now, she thought, maybe it was his sleeping mind at work, feeling for something the rest of them couldn’t see with their waking minds. 

Then she noticed the title of the book he had been reading: _Swineherd Legends of the Early Aturan Empire._ Maybe he was a bit mad, after all.

But even so, talking with him had been oddly pleasant. Enlightening, in a way, even with all of the abstract concepts. It was the most straightforward conversation they’d ever had. 

And she believed, just a little more, in the old faerie stories, like Taborlin the Great. Elodin knew the names of things, and if he was cracked, there was more to him than that.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have taken some dialogue directly from the source material in the beginning. Anything you recognize is from chapters 30 and 43 of Patrick Rothfuss’ _The Wise Man’s Fear,_ “More Than Salt” and “Without Word or Warning,” respectively.

Fela found the name of stone six more times—not as dramatically as that first time in the Fishery, but even so, there was a deep satisfaction in watching it crumble into dust with only a word. Even Elodin’s classes seemed to make more sense. She was beginning to understand that there was some method to his madness after all.

Not a _method_ , strictly, the way Mandrag laid out a syllabus at the start of each term. But there was a point to rounds of Interesting Fact that no one else seemed to understand: Elodin was trying to make them think outside of themselves. He didn’t pick the most technical facts, like Uresh’s obscure mathematical concepts that were beyond even Fela’s reach. Elodin went for the most surprising facts, the ones that contradicted the normal way of thinking about things.

Fela realized this, but it seemed that Kvothe didn’t. He tapped his fingers on his desk in annoyance as Elodin asked the class about things that could not be explained.

“There isn’t anything that can’t be explained,” Kvothe said with certainty, like it was another interesting fact.

Fela looked between him and Elodin. She had taken Advanced Sympathy with Kvothe last term, and he had burned his way through it with such brilliance that Elxa Dal sometimes deferred to his explanations during lecture. But Elodin was too unpredictable to intimidate, too offbeat to be impressed by sheer intelligence. 

“Some things can only be inferred.” Elodin refuted Kvothe with a smile, and Kvothe seemed to physically swell. “By the way, your answer should have been music.”

“Music explains itself,” Kvothe shot back.

Fela watched the two of them face off. Kvothe’s eyes darkened from light to dark green in anger, his voice rising each time he responded. Elodin stayed surprisingly calm as they argued, and when Kvothe scrambled for a response, Elodin turned to Fela for another example of something that could not be explained.

“Love?” Fela tried, and Elodin nodded.

“Hold on a moment,” Kvothe interrupted. He and Elodin verbally sparred for a few more moments. When Kvothe kept pressing, Elodin grew agitated and pulled Kvothe and Fela up onto the stage at the front of the lecture hall.

“Here we have two lovely young people,” he said, arranging Kvothe so that he stood straight across from Fela. “Their eyes meet across the room.”

Heat flooded Fela’s face, and she looked at her feet, unable to meet Kvothe’s eyes. She’d spent good portions of these classes watching him rather than Elodin, but face to face like this, she was sure Kvothe could see the train of thoughts swirling in her head. 

“There is something ephemeral in the air,” Elodin went on, putting his hands on Fela’s shoulders. He leaned on her, warm weight pressing down through his hands, and spoke close to her ear. Although his words carried in the lecture hall, they were seductive just for her, voicing those secret feelings she hadn’t been brave enough to speak. 

“She loves the lines of him. She is curious about the shape of his mouth.”

_He knew._ Elodin knew she cared about Kvothe, and he was tormenting her for all the world to see. A bud of anger flared in her stomach, mixing with her embarrassment.

“There are three paths here. First. Our young lovers can try to express what they feel. They can try to play the half-heard song their hearts are singing.”

Fela dared a glance at Kvothe. His eyes shone bright and angry—if Elodin’s so called half-heard song of love was in Fela’s heart, it wasn’t in Kvothe’s. Disappointment bloomed alongside her embarrassment and anger. 

“The second path is more careful. You talk of small things. In doing so, you slowly learn the secret meanings of each other’s words. This way, when the time comes, you can speak with subtle meaning underneath your words, so there is understanding on both sides.”

Elodin took his hands off Fela’s shoulders, and she staggered a step as he stopped leaning into her. He crossed over to stand beside Kvothe.

Fela braved another look. Kvothe’s hands balled into fists, anger clear in the tight line of his mouth. But Elodin’s face held nothing but lecturing; if he was trying to embarrass Fela, he didn’t show it.

“Then there is the third path. The path of Kvothe,” Elodin continued.

Fela flushed hotter anticipating Elodin’s comments on this hypothetical romance. Would he talk of rescuing a quivering damsel from a fire in the Fishery, like something out of a storybook? Would he mention a green cloak with many pockets, a hesitant invitation to lunch before admissions?

“You sense something between you. Something wonderful and delicate.”

Elodin’s wistful, exaggerated sigh promised his next words would be awful.

“And, because you desire certainty in all things, you decide to force the issue. You take the shortest route. Simplest is best, you think. So you reach out and grab this young woman’s breasts.”

Elodin reached toward Fela’s chest and waved his hands.

Laughter burst surprisingly loud from only five people in the audience. A fresh wave of humiliation rolled over Fela as she crossed her arms. When she flicked her eyes to Kvothe, she saw the same shame. His fair skin burned as red as his hair as Elodin told him, “Quit grabbing at my tits.” 

Kvothe stormed off the stage, grabbed his paper, and headed straight for the door. The rest of the class followed, still tittering. Fela waited a few seconds for them to leave—she couldn’t face anyone yet.

“Fela.” Elodin grabbed her shoulder.

“What?” she snapped, yanking away from his hand. 

Betrayal sliced her. After she’d called the stone, she thought they’d started to know each other. She’d thought there was more to him than airing her personal feelings to the whole class.

Elodin shifted from foot to foot; if he was anyone else, she would have thought he was uncomfortable. He took a breath, his mouth twisted, and Fela waited for an apology. 

“He would have gone for mine,” he said, gesturing at his chest. “They’re bigger.” 

She didn’t spare him a glance as she left the lecture hall.

* * *

In the next class, Elodin not only showed up on time, but looked like a respectable teacher. Hair combed and robes pressed, he gave a respectable lecture from the lectern about the history of naming. It was completely unlike him, and yet it suited him—the intensity, the brilliance.

“Fela!”

He singled her out again, and her heart sank while a spark of anger kindled in her chest. She didn’t know how he could humiliate her worse than he had in her last class, but Elodin was doubtless more creative than she was. 

She climbed the stage with trepidation. Elodin looked surprisingly imposing behind the lectern, and when he grimly handed her a stone and instructed her to name it in front of the class, she eyed it nervously. 

Fela had never called the stone in front of anyone, even him. She tried to slip back into that state of relaxation where her sleeping mind knew things, but she couldn’t find it in front of the class. Elodin’s instruction to _“look_ at it” didn’t help, nor did his slap to the back of her head.

But then something clicked into place: she saw a name and called it and the stone disintegrated in her hand, just like it had those other times.

“Ha!”

A muffled gasp rose from the class, but much louder was Elodin’s laugh. Fela laughed, too, flooded with triumph as she looked at the stone ring that had been hidden in the the larger stone around it. Elodin swept her into a fierce hug and she threw her arms around him. His robes smelled like soap and his hair tickled her arms where they wrapped around his neck. He hugged her so tightly he almost dragged her on her feet for a few steps.

“Fela,” he said when he released her, “your hand.”

There was something ceremonial in the way he slid the ring onto her finger. Fela wondered if he had planned this to make it up to her after the last class, but that seemed too far-fetched for someone as erratic as Elodin. Still, she looked at the ring every few minutes as the class settled down and Elodin finished his lecture. 

He stayed behind the lectern after he dismissed them and the other students poured out of the hall. Fela lingered by the stage.

“Congratulations, Fela,” Elodin said. He stepped out from behind the lectern and down off the stage, and the intensity around him diminished.

“Thank you,” she said. Her irritation with him from the last class had disappeared, but her triumph from this one still glowed in her belly. 

“So what’s next, now that you’ve found the stone?” he asked. “The wind, the fire, the hair on a donkey’s ass?”

She smiled at him, his oddness suddenly charming.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Stone made sense. I’m not sure what comes next.”

It was another question without a logical answer, but Elodin nodded.

“Will you teach me?” she asked after a moment. “Naming, I mean?”

“What have I been doing?” he demanded. “You’re in my naming class.”

“I mean really teach me,” Fela said. Then she grimaced as she realized she’d implied he hadn’t taught her anything in class or during their earlier lessons. He looked at her for a long second, inscrutable, and she couldn’t tell if she’d offended him.

“No,” he said.

Even though she’d called the stone in front of everyone, he still didn’t think she was good enough. She bit down a lump of bitter disappointment in her throat.

“Okay,” she said. She knew better than to push him, having watched him drag Kvothe down maddening dead ends. The light reflected less brightly off her ring as she headed back to her desk to get her notes.

But Elodin put a hand on her shoulder.  

“Fela, Fela, wait,” he said with a laugh in his voice. She stiffened—now he was laughing at her, too. 

She spun around and put her hand on her hip. He raised his hands, palms outward, to placate her. 

“I was expecting more,” he said. “Usually students dog me the first half of a new term, trying to get me to teach them. They come to the University and want to learn naming above all else, like Taborlin the Great. So they seek out Master Namer. They follow me, they plead with me. One idiot E’lir slept outside my rooms for a week—I had to step over him every morning when I opened the door. ‘I paid eighteen talents to learn naming, not to have you tell me that my fingers are too stubby.’ Kvothe jumped off the roof of the Crockery.”

“I thought you pushed him off,” Fela said. Elodin shot her that grin, the not quite sane one. It was even more disconcerting when he was wearing his formal robes.

“He asked me what he had to do to get me to teach him. I said to jump off the roof.” He grinned again. “I didn’t think he’d actually do it.”

Fela snorted. Kvothe had been vague about the incident, and while Elodin wasn’t the most reliable storyteller, his version seemed plausible.

“And the answer is, Fela, that of course I will teach you.”

She almost felt her face light up as she smiled widely at him. Something flickered in his eyes and he swallowed hard before smiling back at her. Absently, he straightened the collar of his robes, and she felt him watch her as she floated out of the lecture hall.

* * *

Elodin’s lessons this time were nothing like his earlier ones and nothing like class. He still made her do odd things, like skip rocks across the river for half an hour or memorize old poems and repeat them backward. Now that Fela knew the reason behind it, though, these outings no longer annoyed her—and it was worth it to see Elodin’s face when she recited a particularly bawdy folk song he had never heard about a famous Modegan courtesan.

Now, away from the others, Elodin was patient and kind and encouraging. Far from the circles he talked in class, he explained things to her in a way that made sense.

“Why don’t I remember the name of stone?” she asked him one day. They sat crosslegged on a secluded patch of lawn at the edge of the University. A breeze crinkled the fallen leaves that had turned colors in the crisp fall nights, but the afternoon sun shone warmly on the two of them. “I’ve called it a dozen times now, but whenever I try to think of it, I can’t remember.”

“Ah,” Elodin said, leaning back on his hands. He looked up at the sky and closed his eyes as the sun fell on his face. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s your sleeping mind that knows the name of stone, you see, not your waking mind. So your waking mind can’t call the stone when you think about it, because it doesn’t know.”

“So every time I want to call a name, I have to go through all this—” Fela made a sweeping gesture, indicating the nighttime walk to the quarry, the clay in her shoes, the skipping rocks “—to get to my sleeping mind?” 

“It gets easier,” he said. He picked up a leaf that had fallen and crackled it between his fingers before opening his eyes to look at it. “It’s already gotten easier, I imagine.”

Fela nodded, brushing back a piece of hair the wind had dragged from her tail and blown across her face. Finding the name of the stone didn’t take as long now as that first time she’d called it in the Fishery.

“The more you do it, the less deeply your sleeping mind falls back asleep,” Elodin said, shredding the leaf into tiny strings. “Soon, you no longer have to trick it, startle it into waking up. Eventually, it’s just lightly dozing, and you can wake it up on command. You learn how to navigate back and forth. Like reading another language, almost—you don’t think about Siaru when you’re reading Aturan, but you can switch over whenever you want without much thought.”

He threw the leaf away and rubbed his hands together to wipe off the little pieces.

“Look,” he said.

He sat unmoving for a few seconds. He stared at the pile of leaves Jamison’s staff had raked into a tidy heap beneath the trees. He studied the leaves with his whole body: the line of his nose, the set of his shoulders, his hands on his knees all leaned forward in perfect concentration. Then his focus relaxed and the corners of his eyes softened. He said something quietly, and the leaves gusted in a whirlwind of red and orange and yellow, even though the breeze had merely rustled them before. 

He looked over and smiled at her.

“Try it,” he said. “See if you can nudge the sleeping mind on command and find the name of the wind.” 

Fela leaned back on her hands like he had, tilting her face up. The sun fell on her closed eyelids, and she tried to relax into that mental state where she had called the stone. 

She thought she might have found it, until the breeze snatched her hair from behind her ear and blew it across her face. She irritatedly brushed it away and opened her eyes to focus on the pile of leaves. 

“I can’t feel it,” she said after a moment.

“The harder you try, the harder it is,” Elodin said. “It’s one of the great contradictions: the more you chase after something, the harder it is to catch. Telling yourself to relax only makes it worse.”

Fela kept concentrating on the leaves, but he was right: the more she tried to relax, the more her shoulders tensed up. She looked toward Elodin to agree with him, but the wind tangled her hair over her eyes again.

When she cleared it away, he still had his arm half-extended in midair toward her, as though to brush her hair back himself. A little frown creased between his eyebrows, and when she looked at him, he froze. For a second, he was caught like a picture of a prince in a storybook: his shirt stretching across his chest as he reached toward her, his hair falling over his forehead, his dark eyes wide and wrong-footed as though he’d been discovered in a lady’s bedchamber. 

Then he let his arm fall back to his side, and Fela shook her head. Heat from the sun had crept into her cheeks.

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t feel anything.”

“It’ll come when it’s ready. Besides, naming’s pointless, anyway,” he said with a cheery grin in her direction. “You told me that much yourself.”

 

Fela saw the madness in him, too. Not all of him was cracked. He was odd and unpredictable, but beyond that, he could be high-hearted and playful. Once, he clapped in delight when a butterfly landed on Fela’s shoulder. One day when they took their shoes off and waded into a stream, he splashed and soaked her, then laughed raucously when she sputtered and tried to wring out her hair.

Elodin lived. The wind delighted him, a raindrop falling on a puddle fascinated him, and the world was his to name. He amused himself with no thought to how he looked to the rest of the University. And Fela began to look forward to those random afternoons or evenings that he found her for naming lessons. The was a liveliness to his company, a joy for the small things in life that he shared by just being there with her.

“Watch,” he said, picking a dandelion. He pulled off tufts of fluff, then tossed them to the wind. “Fly, fly, fly!” he laughed, waving his arms to the sky. 

Some days, he was thoughtful and mild-tempered, and some days, intelligence blanketed him like a cloud so that Fela could hardly breathe when she looked at him.

The intenseness, more than anything else, scared her sometimes. Something flickered about him during those days, something dark and unknown and wild. He’d stare at something with a depth that made her shiver, the corners of his eyes tense and his smile too loose so that it showed all of his teeth. Then he’d turn on a dime, make a lewd joke or say something nonsensical. 

That was the madness everyone else talked about. Fela called it madness, too, because she had nothing else to call it, but she saw it less like madness and more like a struggle. He was brilliant, and it had something to do with that. Something to do with the name of the wind—Elodin had tried to find the names of all things, and in that, he had touched something bigger than himself.

And he fought it. Fela wasn’t sure how. She didn’t know if his adult mind was busy fighting off whatever it was, and so only the childish part of him was left for swear words and silly songs. If whatever he’d found hurt him so badly that he took his mind off it however he could to make himself feel better. If the madness was just a distraction, so that people would pay attention to his oddness rather than whatever actually bothered him.

He was many things, Master Namer. But Fela never tried to pin him down; she just went along with him as best she could. Even when his ideas seemed dubious, like having her blindfold herself and cross the town’s crowded main street in the middle of the afternoon. 

“That sounds dangerous,” she said, looking between the bustling street and the strip of cloth he appeared to have torn from one of his shirts.

“It is dangerous,” he agreed. “But what’s life without a little danger? It’s good for you—the edges of the world wake the sleeping mind.”

“What if I get run over by a cart?”

“Then you get run over by a cart,” he said, with a shrug that didn’t reassure her.

Fela surveyed the street, trying to find a pattern in the traffic. The big wagons passed through the center, and foot traffic stayed to the sides. But there was no structure to the spacing of the wagons; they came from both directions at a brisk trot, sometimes three or four after another and sometimes none for minutes at a time.

Then she couldn’t see as Elodin put the cloth over her eyes. Before he tied it, he smoothed her hair down her shoulders so it wouldn’t get caught in the knot. 

His hands grabbed her shoulders and she tensed under them. When he just stood there, she half hoped he was joking. Maybe scaring her with anticipation was enough for him.

“Go!” Elodin said and pushed her into the street.

Fela stumbled and nearly reached up to pull the blindfold off. Once she steadied, she froze. She was supposed to relax, supposed to find something with her sleeping mind. She tried to listen for the clop of hooves or the clanking of a wagon coming down the street, but all she heard was the clatter of a nearby shop.

She hovered on the side of the street for a moment longer. She couldn’t think of anything: there was no good way to do this.

“God’s breath,” she muttered. “The man is cracked beyond all reason. This is completely ridiculous.”

Feeling like an idiot, she stuck her arms out in front of her and started walking slowly across the street. She hoped someone would see her in time to stop, because her sleeping mind stayed firmly asleep. 

When she judged she had made it halfway without being run down by a cart, her steps grew more confident and she lowered her arms. Elodin must have pushed her out when he saw no one was coming.

Then she heard the clinking of metal harnesses and the creaking of axles; the ground beneath her shook with the thunder of horses’ hooves. They were cantering toward her, faster than the wagons normally passed, and would be on her in seconds. 

“Fela, look out!” someone yelled, and she was dragged nearly off her feet as they wrapped their arms around her and pulled her out of the street. 

It took her a moment to realize it was Elodin. It was the way he smelled; her blinded eyes and pounding heart amplified her other senses a thousand times. He smelled like the wind and grass and cinnas fruit. 

Her legs were shaking and weak from nearly being run over, and she was grateful that he held her so tightly. His arms were strong for an academic—one of them wrapped around her waist and the other circled around her back below her shoulder blades. She pressed against him so hard she felt the solidness of his chest and ribs every time she gasped for breath.

Maybe that was the lesson—to be so terrified that in the seconds afterward, she felt every detail of the world around her. And right now, the world around her was Elodin. She was fully aware of him, the texture of his shirt against her neck, his hand splayed across her ribs a few inches below her breast, the way her cheekbone pressed into his cheek and he turned his head a little so they would fit.

He pulled away and Fela felt his fingers on her face, gently lifting the blindfold. She blinked in the sun and looked up at him as he loosened his grip. His eyes glittered with amusement. 

“That was close!” he said, as though the whole thing was great fun. Fela’s heart hadn’t calmed enough to feel the humor. “He came up on us out of nowhere like a rat out of Tarbean.”

Then Fela realized that Elodin had been walking next to her the whole time, ready to pull her out of harm’s way. A few seconds later, she remembered cursing him under her breath when she started crossing the street.

“Tehlu’s balls!”

Elodin let go of her all the way and turned to look at the four-horse team that had pulled up in the street. The horses snorted, eyes rolling and feet stamping. Their driver looked furious and shaken.

“Just what in seven hells do you think you’re doing?” he thundered. “Crossing the street at midday with a blindfold on, for God’s sake!” 

“We’re finding the name of the wind,” Elodin said, with the wide grin that made students back away. “Now kindly fuck off.”

The man swore at him. Elodin waggled his fingers in a cheerful wave, and the horses trotted down the street. 

* * *

The rest of the span passed uneventfully. The streets were nearly empty as Fela walked back from Anker’s on Reaving night, and at any rate, she had Wilem and Simmon to point out any oncoming wagons that she missed.

Not that they would have been much help. Fela had sipped a glass or two of cinnamon mead as she watched Kvothe play his lute and sing, the fire bringing out the gold in his hair and turning his fingers to fluttering shadows. Wil and Sim, on the other hand, had drunk steadily through the entire set and argued on the walk back to the Mews. 

“Kyrion clearly meant love when he talked about roses blooming on the shadowed wall,” Sim said, and in Fela’s tipsy state, he was darling.

“No, he didn’t,” said Wil. “If he’d wanted it to be love, he would have said love.”

“Well, that’s stupid. You have no appreciation for poetry.”

A flash of movement caught Fela’s eye: a white shirt, dirty pants that might have once been tan, a familiar dark head. 

Elodin walked through the dimly lit alley to their right, and it was the simplest thing in the world for Fela to join him.

“Good night,” she said to Wil and Sim. They gawked at her as she broke away, like they’d never seen her before.

She and Elodin walked a few minutes in silence. She didn’t need to ask where they were going—it was the mead, it was the night, it was the wind calling her. They left the city streets and started onto a dirt trail. A full moon turned the forest around the University into the Fae and put Elodin into view every now and again when the trees parted.

“Do you know what happens when there’s a full moon?” he asked. His voice filled the forest until the night was no longer empty and instead was full of little silver bells. Even the needles of the trees vibrated with his words. 

“No,” Fela said. She couldn’t remember any astronomy at the moment. 

“The moon moves back and forth between the Fae and the mortal world. That’s where it goes when it wanes. When the moon is full here, it’s gone from the Fae—it pulls the Fae closer, and all the fae folk come through to our world.” 

He said it seriously, as though he believed it beyond all doubt. Fela wasn’t sure. It was another faerie story she had never seen with her own eyes. But tonight, with the cinnamon mead in her blood and the moon slanting through the forest, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see some fae creature cross their path.

“That’s why people go a little mad and do strange things. There’s something faerie in them—like those boys looking at you like that.”

Elodin turned to her and leered outrageously. It cut through the pleasant hum in Fela’s veins. Or maybe it was his words—even though Wil and Sim had darted glances at her all night, Kvothe hadn’t looked at her at all, but kept scanning the crowd as if he was searching for someone.

“They didn’t look at me like anything,” she said. The forest had lost its enchanting shimmer and was now annoyingly dark.

Elodin laughed his mad laugh, the one that made her skin tingle.

“They looked at you like they’d never seen a woman,” he said. “Then again, maybe they haven’t. Other than Hemme, and he’s an ugly woman in any world or time.”

“They’re just friends,” Fela said sharply, stopping in the middle of the trail.

Elodin walked a few more steps before he noticed, then turned around to face her. Through the gap in the trees, she could see him clearly for the first time. There was no madness in him: his eyes were clear. He wasn’t cracked tonight, just in a mood—one of the moods where he mocked the whole class or talked Kvothe in ever more absurd circles just to be an ass.

“Just friends,” he repeated. “Fela with her heart of stone.”

The cinnamon mead left Fela entirely. So what if she hadn’t had a storybook romance? She wasn’t a princess in a faraway kingdom. She wasn’t even like Devi, who’d boasted of the scorching sex she’d had with one of the gillers before the short-lived dalliance fell apart in angry tears and red-faced yelling. She wasn’t even like Mola, whose hands shook doing simple stitches when one of the El’thes in the Medica watched her.

So what if some of the boys at the University looked at her? They were always trying to win her over with romantic words, like she was some sort of prize. But she wasn’t—she was just Fela. Wil and Sim didn’t know her, and even if her heart beat faster around Kvothe, her head stayed clear enough to realize he wasn’t meant for her.

“I’m not some—“ Fela began, but then something passed across Elodin’s face. If he had been walking beside her, she never would have seen it. If the moon hadn’t shone through the gap in the trees, she wouldn’t have caught it. 

Maybe it was the faerie coming out in him, like he’d said. Maybe it was old naming magic, with the moon dappling his hair and turning his face to ivory. But even the moon couldn’t touch his eyes, dark and clear and sad. 

He was lonely.

It ached in Fela’s chest, and she wasn’t angry anymore, wasn’t tipsy, wasn’t anything.

“They’re just friends,” she said again, but her voice was softer this time.

After a moment, something in him changed. His shoulders relaxed and his eyes softened.

“Boogers for them,” he said, and started walking again. Fela fell into step beside him. 

The woods were a mysterious place now, full of dark hollows she was just noticing. Elodin was silent beside her, but her mind wasn’t. It shuffled through all the times she had seen him: in the lecture hall, in the courtyard, in the Archives. He was almost always alone.

She didn’t know where he ate, didn’t know where he lived—she assumed he had rooms in the Master’s Hall like the other masters. She didn’t know how he spent the rest of his days when he wasn’t teaching a class or giving her a lesson. She didn’t know what he did at night after he ate his dinner, other than knock on her window and drag her off to the quarry.

But here she was, after a night of music and drinking with her friends, and here he was, out walking alone. Did he have anyone in his life? He was younger than the other masters by at least fifteen years, but older than the students. Plus, most of the University thought he was cracked.

The trail turned back to stone, and they walked nearly back to the Mews before Fela recognized where she was. Elodin walked her right to the stairs. 

She turned and looked back with her hand on the door handle. He stood at the foot of the stairs, black and white in the moonlight and sympathy lamps. In his stillness was a deep sadness. 

Fela wanted to touch him—to squeeze his hand, pat his shoulder, brush his face. But she didn’t. 

“Goodnight, Fela,” he said solemnly, and there was no madness in him.

“Goodnight, Master Elodin.”


	4. Chapter 4

Nearly a span passed before Fela worked up the nerve to do it. She’d thought about trying to grab Elodin after class, or asking during their naming lesson, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to.

So after Manifold Maths on late Felling afternoon, she cast a wide loop, hoping she would run into Elodin somewhere. She found him sitting on the steps of Mains as the sun started to set. He was trying to open a tiny box with no lid, but he looked up when he saw her.

“Fela,” he said, before turning back to the box.

She waited a minute. As she watched him feel the wood with his fingers rather than look at it, she almost lost her courage and justified not asking him because he was busy. But she knew that was just an excuse.

“I . . .” she began. “I was going to go to the Royal Oak for dinner. I was wondering if—if you’d like to come, too.”

Blood rushed into her cheeks and she looked at the ground. When she sneaked a glance at Elodin, he had stopped running his hands over the box and was watching her intently. She looked back down. Any second now, he would laugh or make an off-color joke or explain to her that he was a master and had much more important things to do.

But instead, all he said was, “I would.”

He stood and brushed off his pants, tucking the box into his pocket. Fela started in the direction of the Royal Oak, and he followed. They’d walked miles together—to the abandoned quarry that night, down to the river, through the town—and she’d learned to match her stride to his.

Now, though, it seemed so much more complicated. Elodin walked on the inside of the street, closer to the traffic. In Modeg, it was a chivalrous gesture, but she wasn’t sure he knew that. She’d never paid much attention before when their shoulders brushed, but when she stepped around a piece of garbage and bumped into him, her cheeks flamed again.

They’d walked in silence before—Elodin was full of silences, and Fela followed him. But this wasn’t a silence to let him think: she just didn’t know what to say. They had crossed from naming lessons to something more personal.

At the inn’s door, he reached for the handle at the same time she did. She jerked her hand back, but his thumb echoed warm against the side of her palm far longer than he’d touched her. He opened the door, reaching around Fela to hold it open for her. 

“After you,” he said, with what might have been a gallant gesture if his shirt sleeves weren’t in tatters around his forearms.

The tavern was full tonight. It took Fela a few extra moments to scan for a table; Elodin had stepped close behind her so the door could close after him, and the warmth of his body on her back distracted her.

“Lamb and potatoes tonight,” a serving girl said, passing by them with a tray of drinks. “Out of scutten. Music starts in another hour—Tranton’s playing.”

Something stretched between Elodin and Fela as she headed toward a small table in the back corner. Fela wondered if Elodin felt it, too. He might have paused for a second before he sat down across from her, and it might have been uncertainty when he looked at her from the corner of his eye before motioning to another serving girl.

It wasn’t forbidden, having dinner with him. She occasionally saw other students with the masters in places like this: Uresh with Brandeur or Fenton with Elxa Dal. But they were academic, conceptual discussions—a master following up with his most promising student outside of class.

They weren’t this: going to dinner with your teacher so that he wouldn’t have to be alone.

“What’ll you have?” the serving girl asked them. She was young, fresh-faced, and new enough to town that she didn’t recognize Elodin from the stories.

Elodin gestured at Fela to order first, another Modegan courtesy he probably wasn’t familiar with.

“The lamb,” Fela said.

“And you, love?” The girl turned a dimpled smile on Elodin. As a woman, Fela recognized when another woman was flirting. Something twisted in her belly, but above that, she nearly laughed that the girl was flirting with _Elodin_ , of all people.

“Lamb for me, too,” he said.

If Elodin noticed the girl had given him a smile disproportionately warm for ordering a plate of food, he didn’t let on. But then, men never noticed when women flirted with them. Kvothe was proof of that.

“And what to drink?” the serving girl went on.

Fela hesitated, darting a look at Elodin. Normally, she would get an ale or a wine. But she was here with a master, even if it wasn’t for a class, and she wasn’t sure what was appropriate.

Even if Elodin hadn’t picked up on the serving girl flirting with him, he seemed to understand Fela’s uncertainty, and he took the initiative.

“Beer for me,” he said. “Whatever slop you have. Unless it’s got ginger in it.”

Fela interpreted the serving girl’s look, even if Elodin didn’t: if she hadn’t thought he was good-looking, she would have been offended.

“I’ll have wine,” Fela said.

The serving girl went off with a nod, and that tension settled back between the two of them. Fela snuck another glance at Elodin. His face was open and somehow tentative, and she forced herself to meet his eyes and smile.

He did the strangest thing: he smoothed his hair. He didn’t scratch at it, or pick leaves from it, as he sometimes did. He smoothed it flat, mostly unsuccessfully, then glanced down at the table.

“So, Fela,” he said, after a second. “How are your classes? What are you taking this term?”

Despite the hours she had spent with him, they had never gone through the pleasantries. Fela didn’t know anything about his life or his past, other than the stories.

“Chemistry, alchemy, Manifold Maths,” she ticked off. “Working in the Fishery and the Archives. And your class, of course.” _Introduction to Not Being a Stupid Jackass,_ she didn’t say.

“Manifold Maths,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s high up there. Are you planning to concentrate in mathematics as an El’the?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve always liked math. People say they like it because it’s the same in every language, or that there’s always an answer, but it’s more than that. It’s beautiful, the way things work out. My uncle used to say that math describes the universe, and the universe is the simplest possible perfection.”

“Is your uncle an an arithmetician?” Elodin asked, leaning forward across the table.

“He’s a cartographer,” she said. “He studied at the Arcanum. He traveled when he was younger, but now he mostly does calculations off nautical charts. He taught me before I came to the University—he was the one who recommended me.”

“Ah, so you’re not a Modegan noble,” Elodin said. “Not one of those rich tits here so we can bleed them for their tuition. But I figured not—not a lot of nobility make it to Manifold Maths.”

Fela snorted, thinking of Ambrose. For all of his posturing, he had never beat her in any of her classes.

“No,” she said. “My father’s a merchant.” 

“Does he travel outside of Modeg?”

“Yes, he goes all the way to Ceald. He was always gone for spans at a time. My mother used to complain about not having a man in the house to help with my brother.”

Elodin laughed. He set his elbows on the table, looking genuinely interested.

“My brother’s studying to be a tradesman now. And as annoying as ever whenever I go back home at Mourning—you know how little brothers are.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, shaking his head.

“Sisters?” she asked. It was easy to picture Elodin as a child; he looked like a little boy sometimes when he was happy. She smiled to think of older sisters forcing him into dresses to play at being court nobles.

“No,” he said. “Just me. A strapping young boy, the apple of his mother’s eye.”

He put his hands on his chest and thumbed an imaginary pair of suspenders.

“My father was the only arcanist for miles around,” he said. “People would come from five towns over to get potions, tonics, sygaldry. My mother helped him and was a seamstress on the side. She’d stitch people up for him when they needed it. She said he was the smartest man she’d ever seen, but he sewed like he was blind _and_ drunk.”

Fela listened, fascinated. None of the stories talked about his childhood or his parents; it was as though he’d been born at the University at age fourteen and stayed ever since.

“You lived in a town?” she said.

“Aldergrove. It’s a little village to the south of here, west of Tarbean. Full of farmers and sheep shit.”

Fela laughed and he smiled at her, a perfectly sane smile that warmed his face.

“Your family must have been proud to see you get your guilder and get out of sheep shit,” she teased him. “Master Namer now.”

His easy smile faded, and little lines appeared around his eyes.

“They would have been,” he said. “They died right before I made El’the. Highwayman as they were traveling to someone’s farm. I took an extra span at Mourning to go back and get things cleared up, but there wasn’t much left. Then I came here for good.”

His mouth drooped and his eyes looked far away, through the walls of the Royal Oak and past the University.

“Oh,” Fela said. “I’m sorry.”

He really was alone: no parents, no brothers or sisters, no one at the University.

They fell back into silence. Elodin’s hands found a crack on the table, and he fidgeted with it as he looked across the pub. Fela had forgotten how crowded it was while they’d been talking, but now the chatter and laughter surrounded her like she’d surfaced from underwater.

The serving girl arrived with their food. Fela had been hungry seconds before, but her stomach knotted as the girl set her plate down on the table. It was such a simple thing, sharing a meal with someone; she’d done it a thousand times in the Mess or out with friends. She’d never seen Elodin eat, though, and suddenly the whole thing seemed unbearably intimate.

She started to cut into her lamb, but was distracted by Elodin’s hands as he picked up his knife and fork. She wasn’t sure what she had expected—it wasn’t too far-fetched to think he might eat with his hands. But his knife and fork glittered silver like they were dancing with the gentle movement of his wrist as he cut his lamb into small pieces.

Fela watched him take a bite, the way his mouth closed around his fork. He ate like he did everything, like he was tasting every flavor and learning every texture. When he noticed her watching him, he stopped chewing, then hastily blotted his mouth with a napkin. If Fela hadn’t been embarrassed at being caught, she would have found it ironic: Elodin never cared what anyone thought of him, and now he was self-conscious about the way he ate, of all things. 

“I can’t stand ginger anymore,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “I taught basic alchemy for a while as a giller. One morning, one of the E’lirs—he was an idiot—came in halfway through class, too hungover to keep his eyes open properly. He screwed up his elixir, and the fumes made him sick. I came over to douse his fire and he threw up all over me. Smelled like ginger, I swear—it was the damnedest thing.”

His nose wrinkled in disgust. Fela laughed; she could picture him, robes neat like the day she’d called the stone in class, the revolted look on his face as he stood there in shock.

“He was a halfwit. I tried to fail him after he destroyed a bunch of lab equipment, but the Chancellor wouldn’t let me. His father had very deep pockets—a duke or something.”

Fela laughed again, and from that, dinner was a simple matter. Elodin entertained her with stories about memorable students he’d taught: a boy who had added his ingredients in the wrong order and melted his cauldron, a girl whose long hair caught on fire when she leaned over her burner, a man who mistakenly drank an aphrodisiac tonic and followed Mandrag around for the rest of the day, reciting love poetry.

He punctuated his stories with waves of his fork and playful grins between bites. Fela’s lamb was cold by the time she finished, as she’d spent more time laughing than eating.

When they finished, Elodin put his knife and fork on his plate surprisingly neatly, and the serving girl came by to pick up their dishes.

“Another round?” she asked.

Elodin’s shoulders tensed, and he leaned back in his chair. He glanced at Fela, then back to the serving girl.

Fela understood: if she said no, they would leave and the night was over. If she said yes, they would stay for at least one more drink.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I had wine.”

Elodin relaxed.

“Another beer for me.”

By the time the girl came back with their drinks, a lutist had taken the stage and was tuning up. Elodin stood and pulled his chair around to Fela’s side of the table so he could see the stage. His arm brushed her elbow, and the wine in her blood made it tingle.

The lutist wasn’t as good as Kvothe, but he sang the popular favorites and the crowd was too drunk to care. Fela clapped with the rest of the tavern through a rendition of “Knackerman, Knackerman” and laughed delightedly as Elodin sang along, his voice light and surprisingly lovely. 

She spent half of the next song looking at him. He didn’t hear the music the way the rest of them did: he _lived_ it. He felt it in his fingers drumming on the table, in his feet tapping along to the rhythm, in his upper body swaying in time, sometimes just brushing her shoulder. His eyes were bright, his cheeks flushed from the beer, and his hair still unruly, even though he’d tried to straighten it earlier.

He looked happy, and Fela glowed with accomplishment for making him look like that.

The lutist finished the song and paused to retune one of his strings.

Elodin leaned toward Fela to talk over the crowd.

“Think he’d know that Modegan folk song you told me?” His mouth was so close she could almost feel his lips brushing her ear. She caught a whiff of his beer as he breathed warm on her neck, and she shivered.

She couldn’t think of a response—she’d had more wine than she thought—but then the lutist went into the next song and there was no point trying to answer Elodin.

The lutist played another ten minutes, finished off with “Tinker Tanner,” and announced he was taking a break. Fela snapped back to herself, like she was waking up. When she turned to Elodin, the strange energy swirled around them again.

“It’s getting late,” she said, although she’d stayed out later than this with her friends. But tonight was something different. “And I have class in the morning.”

Elodin nodded and stood, then moved his chair so she could get out. Fela headed to the bar to settle her tab, but Elodin pulled out a handful of iron jots and insisted on paying.

“I’m not completely destitute,” he said. “Master Namer makes a salary, even if it hardly befits the invaluable services I provide.”

Then they were out of the Royal Oak and into the cool evening air, Fela ducking under his arm as he held the door open from the inside. The silence was easier walking back to the University, even though the wine sent a rush of heat through her when she stumbled in the half-dark and Elodin reached out to steady her shoulder without thinking.

He walked her right back to the steps of the Mews. He’d had perfect manners all evening, Fela realized, better than the rich students who sometimes took her out to dinner. And he’d been much better company.

She wanted to tell him what a good time she’d had, how glad she was that she’d asked him, that she was happy he hadn’t been alone tonight.

But instead, she just said, “Thanks. For getting my dinner, I mean.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, with a smile she didn’t recognize.

And then he walked away, whistling “Tinker Tanner.”

* * *

She asked him again the next Felling night. As usual, she had no idea where to find him, so she tried her luck and went back to Mains where she’d found him this time a span ago. 

Against all odds, he was there, sitting on the steps. Even more surprisingly, he appeared to have combed his hair. It was easier to ask him this time, easier to walk to the Queen’s Crown, easier to find a rhythm, dinner and stories and laughter.

When she found him there the third Felling night, his hair suspiciously neat, she wondered if he was coming to the same spot on purpose so she could find him. But that seemed presumptuous; this wasn’t a faerie story, after all, like Elina meeting the Swan Prince every seven days in the woods. 

They trudged through the snow for the rest of term, and again when she came back after Mourning and the new term started. They spent two wretched spans in near-silence when they heard Kvothe had been lost at sea outside Junpai. Elodin drank far more than was proper for a master in public, and Fela wiped her eyes on her napkin. 

But she hadn’t cried half as hard as Sim, whose eyes were red and watery for nearly the entire term.

“I can’t believe it,” Fela said. “That he’s gone. Everything that happened here—Ambrose trying to kill him, being attacked in Imre, the draccus—and then a shipwreck, of all things.”

“He was a cocky little shit,” Elodin said, staring down into his empty mug. “But he was brilliant—as brilliant as any student I’ve ever seen. More, probably.”

One crisp evening as winter hinted at spring, they walked over to Imre and the Eolian, and laughed over the bridge on the way back to the University.

“Have you ever seen the moon from the roof of Mains?” Elodin asked.

“No,” Fela said. “I’m usually asleep at night. In a bed, like a normal person.”

He laughed. 

“Come on, then,” he said, and started walking toward Mains. He led her to a tree in the corner of the courtyard, pale and leafless.

“Ladies first,” Elodin said, with a grand gesture at the tree.

“What?” she asked, confused. “You’ve had more to drink than I thought if you want me to climb that.”

“Psh,” he said. To her amazement, he scrambled up the tree. It was surprisingly graceful: his arms stretching for the lowest branch, a little hop, his cloak swishing as he swung himself up. The movement was fluid enough to tell Fela he’d done this many times.

“Your turn,” he said, grinning down at her from the higher branches.

Fela looked up at the tree dubiously. She’d never been much for climbing trees to begin with, and when she was tipsy didn’t seem the best time to try.

“I’m wearing a skirt,” she said.

“No one’s out here.”

Elodin dropped out of the tree. He was down on one knee, his arm around the back of Fela’s knee and his hand on her calf, before she knew what was happening. He hefted her into the air and she caught the lower branches, then scrabbled to pull herself up. Her cloak caught on the bare branches, and she wrapped it closer around herself.

He was up beside her in a moment, then on the roof of Mains. He reached down and grabbed her wrist to pull her up; his hand moved to her waist and the small of her back when she climbed onto the roofing tiles. His hands were warm, but she shivered when he touched her. 

“The best view is this way,” he said, striking off across the roof. Fela followed him to the other side of the building, past a brick chimney, to where he tucked his cloak under himself and sat. She carefully sat beside him, wrapping her cloak closer around her shoulders.

“I used to sit here for a whole day at a time when I was a student, looking for the name of the wind,” he said.

“How did the masters feel about you skipping all of your classes?”

“They didn’t mind. I was such an exceptional student, after all.” He shot her a wide grin, teeth white in the moonlight. “Besides, it’s not like Lorren was going to climb the roof of Mains to come get me.” 

Fela wrapped her hands around her knees and looked up at the moon. Elodin stretched his legs out in front of him, almost to the edge of the roof, and leaned back on his hands. 

“How many names do you know?” she asked him.

“You can’t ask me that,” he said in a scandalized tone. “It’s bad taste. It’s like asking a man how often he sleeps with his wife.”

“You people—you are so insensible about sex here,” Fela said, rolling her eyes. Elodin raised an eyebrow at her. “In Modeg, talking about sex is like talking about the weather. It’s just another part of life.”

“How barbaric of us here in the Commonwealth. Then again, I’m a confirmed bachelor, so maybe that’s not the right comparison.” He thought for a moment. “It’s like asking a man how often he pulls his pizzle.” 

Fela shook her head, grinning despite herself. He was so childish sometimes.

“Eight,” he said, after a bit.

“Eight?” Fela said, surprised. It only took eight names to be Master Namer? And here she thought he knew dozens, a hundred. “Eight names—that’s all?” 

“Eight times a span,” he said. When she looked at him uncomprehendingly, he made a crude motion with his right wrist. She understood and elbowed him, laughing. She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “‘That’s all?’ Ye Gods, Fela, I’m not a 17-year-old boy anymore, pretending to be asleep when my bunkmates come in. I have my own rooms now, all for myself.” 

His grin was half-impish, half-abashed, and she laughed.

“Do you know the name of the moon?” she asked, when she’d caught her breath. 

“There you go again,” Elodin said. “Are you going to ask me next if I go to bed with men?”

_“Do_ you go to bed with men?” Fela said, distracted.

“Of course not. I absolutely cannot stand beards.”

He scratched his chin. He was clean shaven as always, but over the course of the day, dark shadow had crept over his jaw.

“Calling the moon is for twats,” he said, apparently unperturbed by her questioning his choice in bed partners. “Do you know the story of Hamlin?”

Fela shook her head.

“Hamlin was a blacksmith, and he fell in love with the mayor’s daughter. But he wasn’t rich and he wasn’t noble, and so she wanted nothing to do with him. He tried everything to win her love, and finally she told him she would only marry him if he gave her the moon, knowing full well it was impossible. Hamlin went everywhere searching for the moon—seven years, and he finally found its name. So he went back to her and called the moon down from the sky.”

“And?” Fela prodded. It was peaceful up here on the roof, just the two of them in the dark and quiet while the rest of the world slept. The night was cool, but her cloak was warm around her shoulders. 

“She fell in love with him, just like he’d hoped. So he kept the moon there, day and night, to keep her happy. But with the moon stuck in the sky, the sun couldn’t come up. And the moonlight wasn’t enough: all of the plants withered and died, all of the gardens and flowers dried up, all of the crops were ruined. They finally came to their senses and let the moon go, and when the sun came back and they saw how bad things had gotten, her love dried up and she left him.”

“She should have known not to keep the moon,” Fela said. “Everyone knows you can’t tie down things like that. You just enjoy them while you can. Besides, there are other things in life.” 

“Not even the moon would sway Fela,” Elodin said. “Fela with her heart of stone.”

“What would I do with the moon?” she asked. “Eat it? Sleep with it under my pillow?”

“So you want chocolates and rose gardens and love songs under the stars? How storybook of you.”

“No, no,” Fela said, trying to explain. “I don’t need anything like that.”

Elodin shot her a questioning look.

“When I was sixteen, my father took on an apprentice,” she said. “He traveled with my father for two years, but one winter, they came home and stayed all through the next summer.”

It was the longest her father had stayed home since Fela had been a little girl. She remembered the masculine presence of a grown man in the house, and how the apprentice had come through the door. He was unremarkable, other than the faint jealousy he inspired in Fela that her father had time to spare for him. 

“His name was Jaric. It took him a span of days to talk to me, and all he said was ‘hi.’ Then he asked me where he could find a book he was looking for in the library. I showed him and he said thanks. I brought him a cup of soup in my father’s study. One day, we ate together.”

She didn’t remember everything vividly—only the feelings were left. Her heart fluttering when he stood close to her, and she realized he had lovely, clear eyes with long lashes. A tingle in her cheeks when he sat next to her. The sweet smell of grass as they walked through the garden and he shyly held her hand. The breeze in her hair when he kissed her for the first time. 

“It wasn’t like a storybook,” Fela continued. “It wasn’t like how Lady Leonora fell in love with the troubadour when he sang under her window, or when Princess Miriel loved Darian the Valiant when he rescued her from the dragon. They were just little things, until one day I realized that I loved him.” 

He’d gone away with her father at the end of the summer, and Fela had cried for days. When he finished the apprenticeship, he went back to the western side of Modeg and she never saw him again. She knew now it was just young love, a pleasant summer from a simpler time.

“Hmm,” Elodin said, rubbing the sole of his boot with his other foot.

“I suppose you were another one of those cocky boys singing under windows and writing poetry and looking for the name of the moon to win your lady love?”

Elodin lay all the way on his back and looked up at the sky. He rested his head on his hands, elbows wide. After a moment, Fela followed suit. His elbows were only a few inches from her head, and her hair fanned out under her, almost touching him. 

“No,” he said. “I came to the University when I was fourteen. I wanted women as much as I was terrified of them. I memorized the first ninety-nine sympathetic bindings so I could show off for Corinna in my Principles of Sympathy class, but she didn’t know I existed. By the time I got my guilder, I was eighteen, the same age as all of the girls who were just starting. I spent the next few years as a giller teaching students who were older than I was.”

Again, Fela was struck by how alone he was. He fell into the age gap between the students and the other masters now, and he’d been separated from everyone else as a young man, too. Had he ever had a chance to live a normal life, to drink with friends in a pub or complain about the masters as they searched for books in the Archives? 

“So no young love for little Elodin,” he finished casually, but Fela caught the sadness underneath. “No chocolates or calling the moon.”

They lapsed back into another one of their silences.

“Not that the moon is an easy one,” he went on. This was safer, more familiar—he was teaching her again, and his words flowed more easily. “It’s hard enough to understand a stone or a chimney fire or a piece of iron. To understand something as big as the moon, as far away . . . it’s not like you can call it down from the sky like Hamlin.”

Fela looked up at the moon and tried to wake her sleeping mind. She was halfway there already, lying down and relaxed. But when nothing came to her after a few moments, she stopped looking at the moon and turned her head to look at Elodin. He lay on the roof as though it were a soft bed. His legs stretched out long and his cloak draped idly over one side. 

The moon cast some parts of him in shadow and highlighted others in silver: the slope of his nose, the curve of his mouth, the lines of his chin and throat. He stared so intently at the sky, it was as though he’d frozen in time while the world spun around him. He was beautiful, and Fela felt so self-conscious, terrified he would catch her looking at him, that she sat up quickly and her hair caught on the roofing tiles. 

“Hmm?” Elodin said, propping himself up on his elbows into a half-sitting position. He looked at her with an easy, liquid smile, still at home on the roof. Then something changed, and the air around them thickened, as though he had called a thunderstorm.

He was asking her something with his eyes—a wordless question in some language of his she didn’t understand yet. But it still made her cheeks flame and she had to look away.

That heavy silence blanketed them for another few seconds. 

“I should probably get to bed,” she said. “I have Differential Geometry first thing tomorrow.” 

“With Brandeur?” Elodin asked, getting to his feet. “He’s allergic to most women’s perfume, you know. Just dab some on your clothes and he’ll have a sneezing fit and let you out early.” 

“And how do you know this?” Fela said, as he led her back to the courtyard where they’d climbed the tree.

“From experience.” 

He went down first. Getting down from the roof to the tree was easier than getting up, but once Fela had climbed into the tree, the trunk stretched down six feet to the ground. She tucked her cloak into her skirt so it wouldn’t tangle in the branches, then scrabbled down the trunk.

Elodin reached up and put a hand on her lower back to steady her. She spent a few moments untucking her cloak from her skirt and brushing pieces of bark off the front of her shirt. Then she straightened her hair, even though it was dark and no one else would see it.

When she turned around, he was closer than she expected. Her chest brushed against his. 

“Sorry,” Fela said, looking up at him.

They nearly bumped noses. She stood there for a second, surprised and disoriented in the dark. He was a few inches taller than her, and his breath whispered over her mouth. If he’d worn ladies’ perfume to Brandeur’s class as a student, he wasn’t wearing it now. 

Then he stepped away. He walked with her back to the Mews, and that same silence from the rooftop followed them. It swelled when she climbed the steps and turned around to face him.

“Brandeur hates having his ears flicked, too,” he said before she went inside. “Although you didn’t hear it from me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Or as I like to summarize this chapter: “Elodin goes to dinner with the most beautiful woman at the University and talks about barf.”


	5. Chapter 5

When Fela jolted awake, she wasn’t sure why. The Mews were always quiet at night, other than a door creaking or some giggling from the younger students, and she didn’t hear anything unusual as she lay in bed and listened.

Then the roof creaked above her. More than the creak of the wind or the night—it was someone walking.

_Elodin._

He didn’t come to her window and she didn’t see him as she got out of bed, yawning and rubbing her eyes. But she knew, maybe in her sleeping mind, that it was him walking the rooftops at night.

Still groggy and half asleep, Fela pulled a blanket from her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders over her nightgown. She was glad for it when she stepped out the back door of the women’s wing into the chilly night air.

Elodin sat on the steps, his back to her and his head in his hands. He wasn’t wearing a cloak, and his white shirt pulled tight over his shoulders. Fela walked to him and stopped, not quite touching him.

“Master Elodin,” she said, her voice cracking from sleepiness.

“Fela,” he said, without looking up.

“What are you doing out here at this time of night?”

“What are _you_ doing? Why aren’t you in bed like a good little Re’lar?” he shot back, and she took a step away from him.

“I . . . heard something. I thought it might have been you.”

“Ah.” That one syllable was sharp and mocking. It was the same tone he used to cut through self-important students who tried to cajole him into teaching them naming. Fela flinched.

“Were you calling the moon?” she tried again.

“Hunting the night,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “In the darkness, all heroes are shadows.”

He wasn’t making any sense. In the dim light of the sympathy lamp, she saw that he’d scraped his hand, and a bit of blood had trickled over his knuckles and down the underside of his wrist.

“What happened to your hand?” Fela asked.

“I scraped it on a falling star,” Elodin said. “I made a wish and it crashed to the earth rather than do what I wanted.”

He stood up and walked down the stairs, away from her. When he reached the bottom, he turned back around, shifting his weight from foot to foot as though preparing to run away. Fela squinted at him, her eyes dry and gummy. The madness was back—the tenseness in his face, the lines that were usually only there when he smiled, something dark and wild in his eyes.

“Come here and let me take care of you,” she said.

He froze.

He stood utterly still, as though he’d been turned to stone—like Fela had named the stone in reverse.

She came down the steps and took his hand, holding it up to see better in the weak light. He stood still for her as she turned his hand over, tracing the line of dried blood that had flowed down over the tendons of his wrist. She’d only studied at the Medica her first couple of terms before going with the Archives and the Fishery, but even that was enough to tell the scrape on his hand wasn’t serious. Not bad enough to need stitches; if he kept it clean, it would be fine in a few days.

She looked up to tell Elodin this, but lost her words. He had been watching her examine his hand like a wondrous child, and when his eyes met hers, they were shining and brimming with tears. Then the tears spilled over and ran down his face.

“Oh,” Fela said, too sleepy and off-balance to know what to say. Some maternal instinct took over. “Oh, sweetling.”

She let his hand fall back to his side and spread her arms wide, the blanket draped across them. It was an invitation, reaching out to a lost boy who had scraped his hand and something so much deeper.

Elodin stepped toward her and she wrapped her arms around him, tight enough to feel his ribs. He didn’t hug her back, just kept his arms by his sides. He’d been strong when he pulled her from the street and helped her up the tree, but now he was limp and weak.

“Come now,” Fela said, awkwardly pulling him down with her to sit on the stairs. She twisted her torso toward him, holding him close and wrapping the blanket around them both as best she could. He clung to her; his hands gripped her forearms and his head dropped to rest on her shoulder.

And Elodin wept. He cried into her shoulder, his cheek hot and wet against the bare skin of her neck above her nightgown. It wasn’t restrained crying, damp eyes at the end of a play or a tragic song. It was all-out crying with convulsive gasps, the way Sim had bawled into his drink when they heard Kvothe had died. It was the way her brother had cried when he’d fallen out of the tree.

“That’s it,” she said, like she was soothing a baby or a wounded animal. “I’m here.”

She had woken up by now, but it still felt like a dream. Her heart broke for him, for the boy who’d gone searching for the name of the wind and found so much more. More than he could handle, more than he could keep inside sometimes. He was stuck in a world that was bigger than him, and there was no one else who could even see it, let alone understand.

So Fela just held him, her hands rubbing wide circles over his back and the thin fabric of his shirt.

“It’s too cold for you to be out without a cloak,” she told him, and he clutched harder at her upper arms. “You’ll get chilled.”

She stroked the back of his neck and up onto his head, his hair soft and thick. After a few moments, she laid her cheek down on top of his head.

She held him until his sobs faded into little gasps, and he fell so quiet she wondered if he’d fallen asleep sitting up. Then he shifted; he let go of her arms and slowly straightened, the blanket slipping off one of his shoulders. When he looked at her, his eyes were red and swollen, but the wildness was gone.

Pity flooded through her again, and Fela reached out, brushed his hair back, and kissed his forehead.

Elodin didn’t move, and his eyes were still closed when she pulled away. When he opened them, there was something so deep in them she couldn’t stand to look, some emotion all the way to the heart of him that she didn’t have a name for.

Abruptly, he stood, the blanket falling from his shoulders the rest of the way. Fela swam in it alone, and he was down the stairs before she had stood and picked the blanket off the ground.

“Don’t let a passing star cut your hand,” he said. But it was solemn, not mad.

She watched him go; it was only a few steps before he disappeared into the darkness. Then she rearranged the blanket around her and went back to bed.

* * *

Elodin was avoiding her. Fela was eventually forced to that explanation, after exhausting all other options. He’d canceled the class scheduled the day after he’d come to the Mews with a note posted on the door of the lecture hall: “Class canceled—go find the edges of the world.”

In his next three classes, he lectured intensely. Sometimes he stood behind the lectern, a rarity. Sometimes he paced back and forth across the stage in a deliberate way so unlike his usual wandering that Fenton and Uresh sat up straight and took notice for the first time since she could remember.

His lectures were clear and coherent—Fela thought he even had notes on the lectern once. He wasn’t meandering now, wasn’t making them search for answers: he was telling them in a logical way, so pointed it was almost scary.

“Naming is not an exact science, like artificing or chemistry. It is more of an _art_ —like painting or poetry or music. One person may see a name in a tree, while another finds it in the water, while another person feels nothing at all.”

Beside Fela, Inyessa scribbled notes for the first time in months.

“Despite what you may think about the inexactitudes of art, naming requires just as much, if not more, concentration and focus than any of the other fields you’ve studied at the University. Any numbskull can mix ingredients together to brew up a tonic. But only a well-organized mind can consistently find the names of things.”

Elodin abruptly stopped pacing and turned to face the class.

“What is a way to quiet the mind? Breann.”

“M-meditation?” Breann gulped.

“Yes. Meditation is an ancient practice that, over time, will slow the flow of extraneous thoughts. The Adem mercenaries have a series of movements called the Ketan that they use—”

Fela wondered if this was how Elodin had taught years back, before whatever had happened to him. She wondered if he’d lectured with this intensity, a thunderstorm compressed into one tiny point.

To her chagrin, he’d stopped doing Interesting Fact at the beginning of class. She’d spent four hours in the Archives the night before, scouring the most esoteric books she could find for odd facts to impress him. She stayed after class each time, hoping to catch him, but he strode off the stage in a billow of his master’s robes and was out the door before the students.

He didn’t find her for any more private lessons. He wasn’t on the steps of Mains on Felling night. Fela wondered if he had found another student to teach—someone brilliant, like Kvothe, not someone like her who just worked hard—and jealously roiled in her stomach.

Then she caught sight of Elodin in the Stacks as she was getting a book for a non-Arcanum student. He was wearing all of his clothes, and he ducked into a narrow aisle and vanished before she could catch him. She knew then he was avoiding her.

After all this time, she still hadn’t figured out his schedule, or if he even had a schedule. So it was by coincidence that she spotted him walking past the bursar’s office as she was coming out of Mandrag’s class in Hollows. By the time he saw her, it was too late for him to run away, and he watched her march over to him with something like apprehension.

Fela was too irritated to greet him properly, so all she said was, “Are you coming to dinner tonight?”

He looked so chastened that for a moment, her anger evaporated and she nearly laughed—Master Namer, who had antagonized the entire University for years, brought to task at last.

“Yes,” was all he said.

“Okay,” she said, and she wasn’t angry anymore. It had turned into a pleasant afternoon, still not quite spring, but sunny.

They walked in silence away from the University. Fela hadn’t had a particular place in mind, and eventually, Elodin guided them to a small pub off the main streets. Fela had never been there before.

“Elodin!” the barkeep boomed when they got inside, and Elodin waved.

“Rogan.”

Then the man saw Fela and shot Elodin a wide smile.

“And hello, miss,” he said with a wink and a tip of his head.

The barkeep knew Elodin: he had clearly been here before. Fela wondered if he came here often, alone, to eat or drink or spend an evening.

He led her to a small table in the corner, next to a low fire in the grate. That silence was back, the one that swirled around them like a sentient being. _Are you avoiding me?_ Fela wanted to ask. Or maybe, _Are you feeling better?_ or even, _Are you alright?_

But he’d spent over a span steering clear of her and she didn’t want to push him now that she’d finally caught up with him, so instead she just set her books on the table.

_“Advanced Chemical Principles_ ,” Elodin read, flipping through the inside cover. “Is Mandrag still doing the demonstration where he burns magnesium powder after everyone puts their eyewear on?”

“Yes, he did it at the start of term,” Fela said.

“He’s been frightening students with that for years,” he said.

It was polite, careful—the sort of thing he might have asked her months ago, when she’d first asked him to dinner and neither of them knew how to act. He was avoiding that night on the steps of the Mews, too.

“How is Differential Geometry?” he asked. It was another polite inquiry, the kind that wouldn’t startle anyone.

“It’s fine. We’re learning the Weyl method.”

“To derive the Schwarzschild metric?” he said, and she nodded, not surprised that he’d obviously taken the class as a student. “How about the Fishery? Are you doing more sympathy lamps?”

“I’m helping Kilvin with a new idea for his ever-burning lamp,” Fela said. “I’ve had a lot of spare time lately.”

Elodin looked down at the table. Fela knew he understood—she’d had spare time because she hadn’t seen him outside of class.

She hadn’t realized until this past span how big a part of her life he’d become. She’d hardly noticed as their naming lessons and dinners became her favorite parts in the rhythm of classes, the Archives, and the Fishery. She’d missed him.

“I—” he swallowed. “I’ve been . . . busy,” he finished lamely.

He glanced at her for a second before looking away toward the bar. Rogan noticed and shooed a serving woman over to their table.

“Elodin,” the woman said, with a warmth that made Fela stiffen. “The Bredon beer, as usual?”

The serving woman knew his preferred drink. Just how well _did_ she know him? Fela tried to gauge the level of familiarity between them: small talk as he ordered, a sit-down conversation on a slow night, a tipsy walk back to the University and through the side door of the Master’s Hall . . .

Elodin gestured to Fela.

“Water,” Fela said, hearing the coolness in her voice. She tossed her hair over her shoulder, glad she’d brushed it until it shone that morning.

The serving woman’s eyes narrowed, and she put a hand on her hip as she turned to Elodin.

“Same,” Elodin added.

The woman left with a dirty look at Fela. Elodin watched as Fela smoothed her hair back over her shoulders, and then he looked back down at the table.

“Friend of yours?” Fela asked, gesturing toward the bar.

He flushed, the first time she’d seen him embarrassed. His cheeks turned a bright pink, contrasting with his dark hair and eyes. He rubbed the back of his neck. Jealousy twisted in Fela’s chest.

“Not really,” he mumbled. “She was much friendlier than I was.”

“You people get so embarrassed here about sex. Sex by itself does not mean commitment in Modeg,” Fela said. It shouldn’t have bothered her if he shared his bed with some serving woman—he was obviously lonely. She should have known he knocked on other people’s windows at night. “People can take a partner for a lifetime or a day. They can come together without expectations and know it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I—” Elodin still wouldn’t meet her eyes, and he opened his mouth and closed it again without saying anything. Fela wondered what the rest of the University would think to see Master Namer so discomfited. “It didn’t mean anything to me, either, when I was younger. And besides, she’s not really my sort.”

Fela looked over to where the serving woman leaned over the bar to talk to another man, her generous breasts pressed up farther by the tabletop. For as absorbed as the woman seemed to be in the man’s conversation, Fela thought her eyes had flickered to the corner and Elodin.

Fela’s curiosity burned to know the type of woman that _would_ turn his head, but she took the easy way out.

“I thought you said you _didn’t_ go to bed with men,” she said.

He gave a startled laugh, his chest collapsing in relief. Then he laughed again—his real laugh, the light, infectious one—and Fela smiled for the first time all night.

“I don’t,” he said.

A different serving girl brought them two mugs of water. Fela noticed hers was substantially less full than Elodin’s.

“It looks like your friend didn’t like me all that much,” she said, pointing at her glass.

“Well, that makes up for the rest of the University,” he said. “Every man following you around like lost a puppy.”

She rolled her eyes at him, despite the fact that it was true.

“Except for the ones who run away to where I can’t find them,” Fela said. She gave him a pointed look.

Elodin looked down again.

“I—” he said. “I didn’t—”

“I would have liked to know that they were alright, and to see if I could help them.”

He drank half of his water in one gulp. He set his mug back on the table and stared at it for a long moment. Then he met her eyes, sighed, and nodded.

It was enough for Fela. It wasn’t an explanation, it wasn’t a rationalization, it wasn’t an apology. But it was something. It was more than he’d given her before—maybe more than he’d given anyone—and it was enough for now. He was trying.

“I figured you had found someone else to teach naming,” Fela said. Her joking tone covered her worry that he’d left her for someone else. “Uresh, maybe, since he likes your methods so much.”

Elodin snorted.

“Uresh may be a magician with numbers, but he’d break a brick with his head before he found its name,” he said. Fela laughed. “None of my other supposedly brilliant students have even come close to finding the name of horse shit. It’s been months—what have I been doing, babbling nonsense at them?”

He raised an eyebrow. He clearly knew how outrageous his classes were and was fully aware of the stories.

“Well, I’ve only called the stone,” Fela said. “It’s not like I’ve had much luck with anything else.”

“But you could if you wanted to,” Elodin said. “You could call the fire right now. In fact, you might as well try; I’m not sure Mena will bring our food now that you’ve scared her away.”

Fela narrowed her eyes at him, suspicious again that he knew the serving woman’s name. Then she studied the fireplace next to their table. She’d never called the fire before—she’d never tried. Stone had just seemed more right to her.

She watched the fire dance in the grate, flames flickering back and forth. She focused on it, her fingernails digging into her palms as she tried to slip into that state where she’d found the name of stone. There was nothing.

“Relax,” Elodin said. He touched her hand before yanking his back as though she was the fire and she’d burned him. She uncurled her fingers in surprise and saw the red marks on her palm. “Now look at it, just gently.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. When she looked back at the fire, she softened her gaze so that the grate blurred a little around the flames.

“Good. Focus on it, but don’t focus.”

The flames danced. There was a sort of pattern, she realized as she watched them. Not a straightforward one, up and down, back and forth. It was more complicated, more complex—but there was a certain symmetry.

“That’s it. You know it. It’s familiar,” Elodin whispered.

And Fela saw it, and she knew the name of the fire, and she spoke it.

Then everything was burning . . .

 

When she woke, she was hot and everything ached. The room came together in pieces, more slowly because she didn’t recognize them. They had moved from their table to a low wooden bench, tucked in the corner. It faced the door of the kitchen and was hidden from the rest of the pub by the wall of booths on the other side.

Elodin was braced against the corner. One arm wrapped around her shoulders, propping her upright. Her head had lolled back against the wall.

He was sitting inappropriately close, but no one could see them and Fela didn’t mind. He smelled nice, like outside and the Fishery and the Archives. A little bit of everything, because he was a little bit of everything. She spent a few more breaths taking him in.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You called the fire,” he said, with a laugh in his voice. “And it flared up and nearly caught the table. Like Taborlin the Great. Then Rogan let me know what he thought of arcanists and magic.”

“Sorry,” Fela said. She lifted her head off the wall, but it made her dizzy and she put it back down.

Elodin laughed outright, another one of his contagious laughs.

“No matter—I got in a bar fight here over naming once and cracked his bar top just to prove my point. He really dressed me down then.”

He laughed again, and it vibrated in his chest to where her arm pressed against his side. His shoulder rose and fell in a comforting rhythm as he breathed.

“Why did that happen?” Fela asked. “That never happened with stone, even the first time.”

“Ah, because of the nature of stone,” Elodin said. “You are like stone, and so you called it. The fire is not like you, and so it was harder for you to understand it, to find its name.”

That made sense, in a way. The stone had always felt right to her. The fire never had.

“Fire is angry,” Elodin went on. He hadn’t found her for naming lessons this past span, but he was teaching her now. “Fire burns and consumes and destroys. It has passion, yes, but it doesn’t last. When it’s finally quenched, it’s gone forever.”

He was stroking her hair, Fela realized, gently where his arm looped around her shoulders. She wasn’t sure he even knew—if he was just doing it absentmindedly, a reflex when he felt something soft.

“Did you call the fire when you were first learning?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Next, after I called the wind. Then, after a long time, I managed the water, then iron. The stone was the last of the basic elements that I found. I searched for it for a long, long time, and the more frustrated I got, the less it came. I was too wayward, too angry, too impatient.”

He’d gotten a drink while she was unconscious—she had no idea how long she’d been passed out. It was overwhelming, all the tiny movements she felt as he reached down to the floor to pick up his mug: the twist of his torso, something flexing in his arm around her shoulder, his hip pressing against her thigh as his chest moved away.

He took a drink, then offered Fela the tankard. She took it with the arm that wasn’t caught against his side. She lifted her head to take a sip, conscious that he’d drunk out of the mug and was now sharing it with her.

It wasn’t water. It was some sort of ale, so bitter it made her cough.

“Sorry,” Elodin said. “I should have warned you. It’s strong stuff.”

“Yes,” Fela choked. Then the initial bitterness faded, and she noticed something else. She took another sip. “But it’s got so many little flavors underneath—plums and nuts and some sort of spice, maybe. I’m not sure.”

Not like the cinnamon mead or fruit wine—all sweetness with no depth. Elodin’s ale was dark and full.

She held the mug out to him and he set it back down on the floor.

“Very observant,” Elodin said. “That’s why you’re the only one in class who’s found the name of anything.”

Warmth crept through Fela’s chest. She’d only had a couple of sips of his drink, so it wasn’t that. And it wasn’t the raging heat of the fire that had torn through her. 

“Like the stone. Stone is for those who are present—for those who see the world around them, for those who make peace with what they have. That’s why you called it first . . . Fela with her heart of stone.”

The warmth was brighter now, spreading down her face and neck. It soothed the dizziness in her head into a pleasant buzz. She lifted her head from against the wall, and Elodin shifted, pivoting against the corner so that he could look down at her.

Her lips curved into a wide smile. He grinned back at her, and he was beautiful and alive and a thousand different things underneath, like his ale.

And then he kissed her.

She could have said it was her head, still a little fuzzy from calling the fire. Or the dim light of the pub flickering over his face, or that the full moon was coming and there was something faerie in him.

But Fela knew that wasn’t true; some part of her—maybe her sleeping mind—had wanted to kiss him for a long time.

He was Elodin—he was everything she had expected, and not. He was gentle, much gentler than she would have thought from the man who had pushed her into a busy street. His hand cradled the back of her head and his fingers twined in her hair—but not to capture her, not to press her harder against him, only to support her.

She’d kissed a few boys at the University, when they’d forced an aggressive tongue in her mouth after a stilted dinner. But Elodin wasn’t an awkward boy, and he didn’t kiss like one. His mouth was slow, his lips barely parted and moving over hers like he had all night to learn how she felt. His stubble scraped against her face, and the roughness of his jaw heightened the softness of his mouth.

He was the one who pulled away, and Fela heard herself sigh.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Elodin said, and there was such alarm in his voice that Fela opened her eyes. “Masters aren’t supposed to be kissing their students.”

He’d diddled his way through her admissions for four years, taught classes with no appreciable structure, and wandered through the town at night. But even if he ignored the standards and customs of the University, he was acutely aware of this line. He exhaled sharply and ran his hand through his hair.

“Well, they don’t say anything about students kissing the masters,” Fela said.

She kissed him this time. He paused for a second, mouth still, like he was thinking.

Then he responded to her, his lips moving over hers. She shrugged, extricating her arm from against his chest, and then wound her hand through his hair. It was as soft as the night he’d cried, and he shivered when she touched him. Her other hand rested on the back of his neck, her thumb pressed into an artery. His heart beat quickly, like he’d jogged to the pub.

She didn’t know how long he kissed her; it could have been a minute or it could have been an hour. She tasted the ale, but it wasn’t bitter now. His mouth was warm and sensuous, his tongue a gentle brush against hers, and she wondered how she could ever have thought he was cracked when he kissed her like this.

Dishes rattled as a serving girl—maybe Mena—set plates down on the other side of the wall. Elodin pulled away like a guilty schoolboy—no, like a guilty master who had nearly been caught kissing one of his students.

“I suppose we should go,” he said. His face was wry and exhilarated and shy and a hundred things Fela couldn’t catch in those few seconds, and something in her chest sang to see him so tender. “Before they set a new precedent and haul a master up on the horns for Conduct Unbecoming.”

He carefully moved Fela off him. After he stood, he reached down to help her up. His hands left spots of warmth on her hand, her wrist, her shoulder where he steadied her.

She hadn’t noticed her books on the floor next to him, but he picked them up on the way out and carried them back to the Mews tucked under one arm. He walked her back up the steps like he had every time they’d had dinner, and she wondered if he would kiss her again.

Of course he didn’t. It was too risky.

So he just smiled at her, a warm, easy grin, and left. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone’s confused, the thing they make is a decanter centrifuge. I didn’t quite describe it correctly, but hey, this is fanfic.
> 
> Also, WELDING SAFETY, sorry for the inaccuracies, yadda yadda . . .

It took Fela two days to realize that Elodin hadn’t given her back her books, but carried them off with him after he’d walked her back to the Mews. She indulged herself for a moment wondering if he’d been so reeling from kissing her that he’d forgotten about them, the way she had. But then her sensible mind reminded her that she had chemistry homework due the next day, and she went to the Archives to find a spare copy of _Advanced Chemical Principles._

She set the homework on her desk before she went to bed, and had nearly fallen asleep when something tapped on her window.

It was Elodin, of course—anyone else would have used the door. To him, the roofs of the University were just a second road.

Fela turned on her lamp and crossed to the window, grateful she had her nightgown on this time. Her cheeks heated to imagine him catching her naked again, but it wasn’t the same mortification she’d felt that night he’d taken her to the quarry. It was something deeper, something that sent heat through her stomach.

She undid the latch and opened the window. Elodin craned his head back to see inside.

“I forgot to give you back your books,” he said. “Lorren would skin me if he caught me using them as a doorstop.”

He passed the two books, her chemistry and alchemy textbooks, up through the window. She set them on her desk, next to her chemistry homework and the borrowed copy of _Advanced Chemical Principles_.

“Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t sure of the proper protocol—he’d come to her room at night once before, but that was before she really knew him. Before he’d kissed her. “Would you like to come in?”

Elodin peered up into her room, the window ledge at his chest. Then he said, “okay,” and clambered inside, like Prince Gallant climbing into his lady’s tower room. But this wasn’t a faerie story. Elodin stepped onto her desk under the window, then dropped to the floor. 

He wasn’t wearing shoes, and his bare feet were pale on the dark carpet. He looked around her room for a long moment, the way he studied things sometimes. Fela fidgeted with her nightgown. Men were allowed in the women’s section of the Mews if they were accompanied by a woman, but the rules didn’t cover masters coming in through windows at night.

But it was more than that. Her room was such a part of her—she’d lived here for two years, done her homework at the desk, slept in the bed he avoided looking at. Fela hadn’t decorated much—not like Amalia, who’d bought new furniture and grand wall hangings—but even so, having him here felt so intimate. He’d kissed her, and now he was here in her most personal space and she didn’t know what to say to him.

Elodin didn’t seem to know what to say, either. He met her gaze for a second before his eyes flicked to her lips and then away. He picked a small box up off her desk.

“Modegan music box?” he asked.

“Yes,” Fela said, moving closer to look at it with him. His hand brushed hers when she took it from him, and his fingerprints left echoes as hot as the imprint of his mouth two days before. “I’ve had it ever since I was a child.”

She opened the box, and a folk melody tinkled.

“Ingenious how they make these without any machinery,” Elodin said. “I’ve seen similar things to the south, but they’re not the same.”

He prodded at the inside of the box, his palm pressing against the side of her hand. She didn’t pull her hand away. He didn’t move his, either, and she was suddenly aware of her pulse beating in her wrist.

“It used to help me sleep when I was younger,” Fela told him.

He looked down at her, the soft light of the sympathy lamp reflected in his dark eyes. Her gaze drifted down to his mouth. As though he felt her watching him, his tongue darted out to wet his lips.

“When I . . .” Elodin trailed off, and Fela forced herself to look back up and meet his eyes. He swallowed hard. “I—”

His mouth opened and closed before turning up in a sheepish smile, and he shrugged. Then he bent his head and kissed her again.

This time, there was no serving girl to interrupt them. Fela reached blindly around him and set the music box back on her desk, then wrapped her arms around his neck. He kissed her like he had in the pub, with a slow intensity that built until she was breathless. The first brushes of his lips over hers were light, almost teasing, and he gently cupped her face between his hands. Then his stubble scraped against her cheek as he deepened the slant of his mouth, his arms enveloping her and pressing her against his body. When he finally slipped his tongue past her bottom lip, Fela grabbed handfuls of his shirt and whimpered.

She slid her hands down his neck, and he shuddered when she reached his chest. He might have come to his senses and realized that a master shouldn’t be in the Mews at night kissing his student. But she thought it was more surprise—that no one had touched him there in a long time.

He’d had women before, she was sure of that. He was handsome and brilliant, and once he’d been completely normal. Women would have loved him, his clever hands, his intense eyes, his carefree laugh.

She didn’t know about now, though, other than Mena the serving woman—if women saw the madness or had heard the stories and so never took the time to know him. Fela’s heart broke a little, even as he kissed her senseless, for this man no one understood. She ran her hands over his chest, down his stomach, down to his hips where his shirt was already half-untucked.

“I want to touch you,” she said.

Elodin stiffened for a second, and his arms loosened around her reluctantly.

He stood still as she untucked his shirt the rest of the way, and he lifted his arms obediently as she pulled the frayed fabric over his head. When Fela met his eyes, his face was vulnerable, so different from his sharp mocking in class, as though he was worried she would hurt him.

She touched him again, the plane of his stomach and chest, the trail of dark hair that disappeared under the waistband of his pants, this time her hands on bare skin. She touched him to learn him, like the pieces and parts at the Fishery, every place just a little different. She touched him to find those spots that made him twitch and hold his breath. She touched him to reassure him, to show him that she wanted him—right now, just was he was, madness and brilliance and all.

“Fela,” Elodin said. It was barely a whisper, but his voice resonated in her chest.

He kissed her again, his mouth searing heat with need for her. Then he tugged at her nightgown, and she understood and dropped her hands to her sides.

For a second, Fela worried that he would make some crude joke, slip back into the madness or pretend madness. _And so you reach out and grab this young woman’s breasts_ flashed through her mind, his wild clawing at her chest that day in front of the class, and her cheeks heated in an echo of that shame.

But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything of the sort when he pulled her nightgown over her head and dropped it on her chair, and she was ashamed of herself for thinking it of him.

“Fela,” Elodin said hoarsely. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Other boys had told her similar things—rich boys trying their hand at poetry or borrowing flowery words from a musician. But she’d spent the last year listening to Elodin’s words and learning what they meant, and she knew he was sincere. He reached out a tentative hand, and when he ran a finger over her collarbone, she grabbed his wrist and pulled him to her bed.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

She turned to face him. She put her hands on her hips and was amused when he couldn’t choose between looking at her face and looking at her naked breasts.

“In Modeg,” she said, “when a woman wants to have sex with a man, she takes off her clothes and leads him to her bed. It is that simple.”

She let her hands fall from her hips and made a sweeping motion over her naked body. Then she turned to look pointedly at her bed.

“I stand corrected,” Elodin said, and he followed her.

Her bed was narrow, not like the huge four poster Amalia had bought, and pressed tightly against the wall. Fela lay back first, and Elodin carefully placed his knees when he climbed over her. 

He wasn’t the first man she had shared a bed with—she’d gone with a couple of University boys back to their rooms in the expensive inns they’d rented from. But Elodin was the first in this bed, and he was nothing like those boys. Fela had seen him stare for ten minutes at a flower, learning how it danced in the wind. He was like that with her ear, or a spot on her neck, or the inside of her elbow, or the curve of her breast. He studied each piece of her until he understood it. One part of her itched with impatience, but the other part enjoyed learning all the ways it felt with his mouth or his tongue or his hand or his teeth.

He sucked gently on her neck, and she dug her nails into his shoulders. She forced her hands to relax and ran them down his bare back. There were long, smooth lines raised on his skin.

“What are these?” she asked, raising her head to try to see over his shoulder.

He laughed into her neck, the rush of air making her shiver.

“Scars,” he said. “From where I was whipped as a student.”

She ran her fingers over them again, running from above his shoulder blades to his low back where his pants would have cut off the lash of the whip.

“What for?” she asked.

“Conduct Unbecoming. Reckless Use of Sympathy,” he said. “Calling the wind on Elxa Dal. Punching another student in the line for admissions. Cursing out Lorren when he wouldn’t let me borrow a book from his private library. I was too big for my britches. The other students got used to seeing me up there every couple of terms.”

His mouth found its way down to her collarbone, and one of his hands slowly traced down to her stomach. When Fela finally scrabbled at the waistband of the pants neither of them had gotten around to taking off, she ached for him in a way she never had for the other boys. His fingers were warm and skillful between her thighs, and the length of him nudged her when he settled between her legs.

“Ready?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I want you.”

Elodin slid into her slowly, one scorching inch at a time. He came to rest all the way inside her, his weight on her and his breath on her mouth, and Fela felt like she could call the stone and fire and wind and thunder and lightning. Not in the sort of pleasure the bards hinted at in their love songs—not a screaming, wild ecstasy. It was a completeness, a rightness, a caesura in the spinning patterns of the world. She wanted him and he was here with her and it was just the way it should be.

He swore in some language she didn’t know.

“My God, Fela.” His forehead rested against hers, their noses touching. “You’re going to unman me right now.”

Then he started moving, a long, slow slide out that was both exquisite and agonizing.

“Is that okay?” he asked after a moment.

“It’s perfect,” Fela said, and she pulled him down onto her all of the way, tilted her head to kiss him, dug her fingers into his hair, wrapped her legs around him. She wanted everything he could give her.

She should have known he would be a generous lover. She didn’t know how she would have guessed, from his nighttime wanderings and nonsense classes. But he _was_ generous—observant and attentive. Already, he had noted those places that made her gasp when he touched them. And he was so responsive to her: when he shifted the angle of his hips and she clutched at his back, he kept doing it. When he pulled all the way out and paused for a moment before sinking back inside her, she couldn’t keep in a tiny moan, and he did it again.

And Fela didn’t have a heart of stone—not right now. Or Elodin knew the name of stone, maybe that was it. This wasn’t a faerie story and she didn’t want it to be one. She wanted this: Elodin on her and between her legs and deep inside her. His breathing grew ragged and his mouth more insistent on hers until he smothered his name on her lips as she arched against him. Shortly after, he breathed a near-silent “Fela” into her ear before collapsing on top of her.

They lay there for a long while, legs tangled in her narrow bed. He rested his head in the crook of her shoulder, and she wrapped one arm around his back, her thumb brushing his whipping scars. She smoothed her other hand though his damp hair, halfway between her sleeping mind and her waking mind.

Finally, Elodin shifted, raising himself above her onto his elbows, then pulling away entirely. She felt coolness where he had been on her and inside her, and she almost called for him to come back.

He reached for the clothes she had dropped on her chair and the floor. He left his shirt untucked and half-askew. To anyone else, he would have looked like the normal disheveled Elodin, wandering the University at night with no shoes. But Fela knew that his hair was mussed where her fingers had dug into him, that his shirt was untucked from her taking it off him, that his mouth was swollen where she had kissed him.

She didn’t bother getting dressed or draping the sheet over herself as she sat up in bed and watched him.

He finished putting his pants on and headed back toward her window.

“Won’t you stay awhile?” she asked.

He shook his head as he unlatched her window and climbed up on her desk to get out.

“Can’t let everyone know Master Namer’s dipping his doodle in his best student,” he said crassly.

Stung, Fela jolted upright and crossed her arms over her breasts.

But then he turned to look at her, one leg out the window like a strange Prince Gallant, and he smiled. It warmed his face and lit up his eyes, and Fela knew he’d said it to cover up how deeply she’d touched him, how much of himself he had given to her.

And so she smiled back at him and latched the window after he left.

* * *

Fela woke at her usual time, and it could have been a dream. She was alone in her bed, the window latched, and everything as normal. Only her nightgown, still thrown haphazardly over her chair, was physical evidence that Elodin had been in her room last night. 

That, and some bruises on her neck that she noticed when she looked in her mirror. She left her hair down, hoping it would cover them.

Breakfast in the Mess was oddly normal after the earth-shaking events of last night, the few students who were eating this early unaware that the eccentric Master Namer had shared her bed.

The Fishery was almost empty this time of morning, and Fela went first to clear off her workstation. She had finished up some sheets of twice-tough glass the day before, and hadn’t decided what she wanted to make next.

She didn’t notice him until she finished arranging her tools and turned around. Elodin stood there, leaning against the the wall, watching her.

“Good morning,” she said, her cheeks warming as she remembered him just a few hours earlier, the weight of him, the smooth skin of his back, the heat of his mouth, the fullness of him inside her . . .

“Good morning,” he said, and there was a shyness in him, something boyish, that twisted her heart.

One of their many silences stretched between them: this one was a little hesitant, the daylight not sure how to handle their nighttime tenderness.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Fela said, and things seemed easier now. It was simpler to talk of small things, like what she was making, rather than try to explain what last night had meant to her. “I’ve been making twice-tough glass to sell, but I’m getting a little tired of it. Kilvin always needs more sympathy lamps, I suppose.”

“Wait a second,” Elodin said, and he disappeared. Even he knew better than to go barefoot in the Fishery, and his battered shoes slapped against the concrete floor as he walked away.

He was gone a few minutes, and Fela finished wiping down her workstation. He came back and handed her a schema.

She paid more attention to the way his hand didn’t quite touch hers than the paper, and she shook her head to clear it as she unfolded the schema and laid it on the table. It was for something she had never seen before, compact and intricate, written in neat handwriting that was vaguely familiar.

“Six 3-inch nickel steel O-ring discs, four bars of chromium steel, and a hollow 18-gauge rod,” Fela read off the list of materials. “Kilvin doesn’t let Re’lars use those sorts of metals.”

“Ah, but you’re doing it for a master,” Elodin said with a grin, and disappeared again.

He came back with the bars of steel in his hands, and pulled the metal discs and the pole out of his pockets. Fela wondered if he had snuck into the stockroom, or if he’d flashed Basil that unnervingly loose smile and Basil had let him in.

She looked over the schema. The six small, O-ring discs would fit over the rod, like enlarged, protruding threads of a screw, and form a scroll. The bars of steel would be cast into a cylinder. The cylinder would lay horizontally, and the ridged scroll would fit inside. Then, both the scroll and the cylinder would spin.

“It’s—it’s a decanter, right?” Fela said. “A fluid spinner—to separate out sediment from liquid, like purifying oil. The cylinder spins, and the liquid comes out one end and the dirt and dregs come out the other.”

Elodin nodded.

“I’ve used spinners like this in the alchemy labs,” Fela went on, “but they just have open bowls and the liquid comes up over the top. It’s such a pain to get the sediment off the walls of the bowl. I’ve never seen one designed like this.”

Elodin looked over her shoulder at the schema, not quite touching her. They’d been much closer than this last night with no clothes between them, but even the heat of his body through her shirt was enough to distract her.

“This design is very complicated,” she said, trying to focus. “Let me think about what we need to do.”

She studied the schema for a few more minutes, charting out the steps in her head. She held up one of the discs, three inches in diameter with a smaller circle cut out of the middle.

“We’ll slide the discs down over the rod and weld them together to make the scroll first,” she said. “And then we’ll have to use the rotating cast to make the cylinder so it’s as symmetrical as possible. Chromium steel is very hard, so we’ll need to pull the cylinder out of the cast before it’s completely cool so we can put in the sygaldry.”

When she was ready, Fela pulled her hair up into a tail to keep it out of her way. She didn’t think anything of it until Elodin’s first two fingers touched her neck, trailing down over the bruises he’d left.

She turned to him. It was the first acknowledgment of what had happened the night before, and his face was open and vulnerable. Fela couldn’t handle the depth in his eyes, and she turned back to the schema.

“Let me put the steel bars in the furnace, first,” Fela said. “It’ll take a while for them to melt, so we may as well get started.”

Back at her workstation, Fela reached for a bottle of acetone and two rags.

“The discs next,” she said. “Here, you can help me get them ready.”

Elodin’s eyebrows shot up.

“Me? I’m a namer, not a shop boy.”

“You’re the one who brought me the schema,” she said. “You’ll have to work, too, if you want to pick what to make.”

“I didn’t stay on at the University to grind glass and mop Kilvin’s floor,” he said, but he smiled at her as she unscrewed the bottle of acetone and poured some on one of the rags.

“I’ll keep it simple for you.” Fela held up one of the small discs to demonstrate. “Just wipe down the inside circle. We want to make sure there’s no dirt or anything to interfere with the weld. Think you can manage?”

“Sounds tricky,” Elodin said, his eyes crinkling with laughter.

He poured some acetone on the other rag and picked up another disc. He wiped it down with small, methodical movements and the total concentration he used to find the names of things.

“Like this?” he asked, holding it out to her.

“Like that,” she said, and he grinned. “Not bad for a Master Namer. I’ll let you wipe down the table next time.”

She watched him pick up the third disc, and then she started cleaning the rod. They fell into a companionable rhythm. They worked side by side, Fela finishing the rod and working on wiping down the remaining discs with Elodin. Sometimes his elbow brushed her, and when she reached around him to put the bottle of acetone back, her hip pressed into his.

It was oddly peaceful—she’d slipped into her sleeping mind, and Elodin seemed to be in that state, too. They didn’t need to talk; she liked just being here with him, having him at her side as they both worked.

It wasn’t a sweeping romance out of a storybook—the Traveling Prince wouldn’t have won over the shepherdess by polishing steel discs to make a fluid spinner. But this wasn’t a faerie story, and it was all Fela needed.

Elodin finished the last disc and lined all six up neatly on her workstation. Fela held one up to the light, looking for any dust, and nodded in satisfaction. 

“Okay, now we slide the discs down over the rod,” she said, slipping the first one on. “It’s a tight fit already, like I thought—whoever designed this knew what they were doing.”

She arranged the six discs evenly down the shaft.

“Now the ground clamp,” Fela said.

Elodin handed it to her. She looked up at him in surprise, and he shot her a grin that said he knew what a ground clamp was. She clipped it to her workstation.

“And now the arc welder.”

He handed that to her, too.

“I didn’t think a namer would know an arc welder from a pile of rocks,” Fela teased him. “Naming doesn’t teach you anything practical, after all—not like working in the Fishery.”

“I did some artificing as a student,” Elodin protested. “Before I became a namer and figured out that real magic was more than scratching random markings on scrap metal.”

“Oh, what did you make? Deck lights? You didn’t like my sympathy lamps.”

Their words echoed the conversation they’d had here at her workstation a year before when he’d first asked her if she wanted to learn naming. The exchange was comfortable this time, not like those first few months when she’d thought he was cracked and never knew what to make of his erratic classes and private lessons. She knew him now—she knew when he was joking and when he was thinking and when he was trying to hide something deep behind sharp words.

Elodin chuckled and watched as she ran her finger over the first disc, feeling how she needed to weld it to the rod. Then she welded the six of them in succession. Each one was just a little different, and she modified the seam each time so that they all fit perfectly to the shaft.

“This is very clever,” Fela said, looking over the completed scroll. “It’s like a conveyor—it’ll force the sediment out toward the other end. It’s much more efficient than just letting the fluid rise to the top.”

Elodin nodded, studying the scroll with her.

“Now we can cast the steel and make the cylinder,” she said. “I imagine the bars have melted by now. And we’ll need a rune pick for the sygaldry.”

Elodin pulled a rune pick out of the jar on her workstation. It was the smallest one with the sharpest, finest point—the one Fela would have chosen. He followed her to the furnace, and Fela poured the molten bars of chromium steel into the smallest cylindrical cast. As the mold spun, the liquid metal would be forced back against the circular walls and cool into a cylinder itself.

It took a few minutes for the liquid metal to shape itself, and longer for it to solidify. Neither of them spoke, and it was somehow soothing to watch the metal cool from a burning white-yellow to a glowing red to a bluish black—like watching a flower unfurl or water rippling over rocks.

“I think it’s cool enough to take it out of the cast, but still soft enough to scratch the runes,” Fela said. “Do you want to hold it or put in the sygaldry?”

“I’ll do the sygaldry,” Elodin said, looking at the cylinder and grabbing the rune pick.

“Be careful,” Fela told him. “ _Pesin_ and _resin_ might sound enough alike for naming, but not for sygaldry.”

“When am I not careful?” he asked. _“Pesin_ and _resin,_ pah. You artificers are like children finger painting with mud—you have no appreciation for the subtle nature of things. We namers know the runes are just shadows of the real names.”

Elodin looked over the sygaldry outlined on the back of the schema, then tucked the paper into his pocket. Fela watched him scratch a set of complex runes in tiny print across the side of the cylinder. They glowed a dull red in the blue metal.

She was again struck by the breadth of him. He was Master Namer, but he had taught alchemy as a giller, and now he had apparently memorized a line of complicated sygaldry and didn’t need the schema for reference. Whatever he’d told her about artificing and naming, he _was_ careful, and the runes were clear and correct.

He finished and caught Fela watching him when he looked up. Her face and neck grew hot, and she didn’t think it was from the heat of the furnace.

“Now we can let it cool the rest of the way before we put everything together,” Fela said. She set the cylinder on the cooling rack.

Back at her workstation, she swept the scraps and metal filings into a bin. Elodin put back the rune pick.

Cleaning up wasn’t her favorite part of working in the Fishery, but there was something intimate about doing it with Elodin. He handed her various tools and she put them back in their proper places. It was simple and unguarded. He wasn’t her teacher and she wasn’t his student; they were just helping each other and being together. He’d taught her naming, and now she was showing him part of her life in the Fishery.

She wiped down the table, then wrung out her rag and turned to watch him straightening a line of jars. He’d changed his clothes from the night before, this shirt faded from white to grey. But even as his elbows threatened to burst through the thinning fabric, he looked surprisingly comfortable there at her workstation, as though working in the Fishery was as natural to him as watching the moon from the roof of Mains.

After they pulled the cylinder off the cooling rack and slipped the scroll inside, fastening everything together was difficult and tricky. Fela only managed with Elodin lending a hand to hold things in place, and she nearly dropped one of the screws when he leaned over and pressed against her back. When they finished, she looked over the fluid spinner with satisfaction.

“It fits perfectly,” she said, turning it over in her hands. It rotated smoothly and near-silently. She passed it to Elodin. “It’s very ingenious. And here I thought you just picked the most complicated schema you could find.”

Elodin gave her a lopsided smile and spent a moment examining the spinner.

“I don’t know why we don’t use these in the alchemy labs,” Fela went on. “Maybe because they’re so hard to make, I guess. Did you know about this design from when you were a giller?”

He paused, studying the fluid spinner in his hands. When he looked at her, the mischief had faded from his face.

“I made it,” he said quietly. “When I was an El’the. Everyone tried to have at least one design of their own, even if it didn’t do much.”

That shyness was back, something fragile in his expression, the way he’d looked at her the night before when she’d taken off his shirt. Fela understood now how he’d scratched the runes so easily, and she felt a wave of embarrassment that she’d instructed him on how to make his own design.

But then warmth flooded her as she caught on to his true intent: he’d wanted to share something of himself with her. She turned the schema over, looking at the bottom corner. _Elodin, Tannegan’s son_ , it read, with a date seventeen years earlier.

“Kilvin will be surprised to see one of these in the stockrooms,” Elodin said. “But it should bring you a good commission.”

“I’m not going to sell it,” Fela said, surprised. “Not if you designed it. I’ll keep it— _I_ can use it in the alchemy labs, at least. It’ll make things a lot easier.”

His face lit up, and the happiness shining in his eyes was worth a hundred times the commission she wouldn’t make, just so he knew that she wanted him.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, everyone, this is it! Thanks so much for reading—I hope it helped us all satisfy our Elodin needs. Cheers!

Fela learned little things about Elodin in bits in pieces, like she had over the past year. He loved to be touched, not just those nights in her bed, but anytime: her hand on his arm or a brush of her shoulder made him smile unconsciously. He had a sweet tooth, and his face lit up in childish delight the time she brought him a cinnas fruit. He hated monthly staff meetings with the other masters and Jamison, and went out of his way to miss them.

He told her about himself sometimes, too. When he touched on something too painful or too deep, he’d crack a joke and change the subject. Fela always let him. She didn’t need to push him—he would open up to her with time.

They spent a few nights each span entwined in her bed. Those calm moments afterward when he stayed a couple of hours before going out the window were as precious as the time he spent inside her.

“What’s this from?” he asked one night, running a finger over an uneven patch of skin on her knee. Her bed was so narrow, they’d had to find a strategy to share it: Elodin lay on his side with his back against the wall, Fela on her back with her shoulder against his chest.

“I skinned it when I was a teenager,” Fela said. “I was carrying in some Vintish vases my father had brought back, and my brother knocked me down onto the cobblestones in the garden. I broke the vases, but I was more upset about ruining my new dress.”

Elodin laughed. His thumb rubbed over her knee before his hand traveled up, finding a little bump on her breastbone.

“Blister pox,” she explained. “I was too young to remember much. Mostly I just remember my mother telling me not to scratch.” 

She caught his hand in hers as it wandered over her breast. He had a burn scar on his forearm, a small patch of pink skin where hair didn’t grow. She’d found it earlier that night, when she’d pushed him onto his back and ordered him to hold still. But she’d quickly gotten distracted by other, more demanding parts of him.

“I burned myself in the Fishery,” he said. “Kilvin got a new reagent and told us only El’thes were allowed to use it. I snuck in and got some out of the stockroom, but I splashed some on myself when I was doping my emitters.”

“Troublemaker,” Fela teased him. She reached over his side and traced a finger up the whipping scars on his back. He shivered at her touch. “I’ve heard the stories—I know what a mess you made as a student.”

“Me? Of course not. I was a model student. Top marks in everything, never called up on the horns for anything.”

Fela’s hand went to his hair next, and he sighed. He especially loved having his head touched, she’d learned. She ran her fingers through his hair, pausing when she found a line of ridged bumps on his scalp, just over his right ear. They felt like scars from stitches.

He stiffened the second her fingers lingered on them. She heard his sharp intake of breath and felt his chest expand and freeze as he held his breath.

“What are these?” she asked, rubbing the bumps gently to learn them by feel.

Elodin stayed quiet a long moment, and the air around them shifted. Fela’s skin had been warm where she pressed against him, but now cool air seeped through the sheets.

“A few years ago,” he said, very quietly, and the fun had left his voice. “In the alchemy lab. I had . . . an accident. Arwyl said I must have fallen and hit my head on the table. He said he didn’t know whether to take me to the Medica where he could see better or stitch it up there in the lab to stop the bleeding sooner. I don’t remember—I don’t remember anything until after he’d taken out the stitches. He came by for weeks afterward to check that it was healing up properly.” 

Fela listened to him talk and heard the surface meaning of each word. But underneath, faster than logic, her sleeping mind found the true meaning of what he’d said. An accident. Elodin couldn’t remember anything, couldn’t remember for maybe weeks afterward, long enough for the wound to heal and the stitches to come out. Arwyl had come by to check on him—Elodin hadn’t been in the Medica.

It was when whatever had happened to him—Arwyl had come to visit him in Haven. Elodin didn’t remember the accident because something had happened that was too much for his mind to handle.

“Sweetling,” Fela said. “Your poor head.”

She rubbed his entire head, making a point not to linger over the scars. She waited a moment to see if he wanted to say anything more about what had happened. When he didn’t, she rolled over onto her side, so that her front pressed flush against him.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, putting a soft kiss to his throat.

He relaxed in increments as she rubbed his head and his back, the tension leaving him until he slackened against her.

He was everything, Elodin, Master Namer. Brilliant enough to call the wind and the fire, strong enough to do as he pleased and not care what the rest of the University thought of him, and yet so fragile beneath her fingers.

* * *

They never talked about those nights in her room during their dinners or naming lessons. Sometimes, when they passed through a dark spot on the walk back to the Mews, he would pull her into shadow and kiss her. Those kisses were all the more intense to make up for their swiftness, his mouth fierce and his hands tangled in her hair. And every few days, there was a tap on her window at night and she would get up to let him in.

Elodin was as unpredictable in bed as he was in life. Some nights, he was as gentle as the first, with sweet words or a slow kiss so tender it almost made her cry. Some nights, he was whimsical and playful, nipping at her ear or teasing between her legs until she begged him to hurry up. One night, he built up a rhythm that made Fela clutch at his shoulders; then he paused all the way inside her and wouldn’t move until she recited the first twenty sympathetic bindings. Fela went through them as fast as she could, messing up simple things in her distracted state. When Elodin was satisfied, he pulled all the way out, teased her for a minute, and drove back inside.

And some nights, he made love to her with a silent intensity, a passion coming from somewhere she didn’t quite understand, but felt all the way to the heart of her.

But tonight, he fidgeted after he climbed through her window. He paced a step toward her bed, then picked up the music box on her desk and turned it over in his fingers. He had on both shoes, although one of them was untied, laces dragging slop over her floor. Underneath, he was only wearing one sock.

“The moon is in the Fae tonight,” he said in a sing-song voice, and when he looked at her, the madness was back in his eyes. “A man could step out of this world and never find his way back.” 

He played with her music box, opening it, then closing it, then opening it again, so that a few disjointed measures of music drifted through her room.

“He could wander five hundred years and never reach the end of the darkness. He could slip past the guardians and learn the truth of things he shouldn’t know.”

They’d never talked about it—he never explained what happened when his face tensed like this and something wild flashed in his eyes. Before when he’d been like this, in her private lessons or in class, she’d gone along with it as best she could, shrugging off the things that didn’t make sense. And when she saw him the next time and he had settled, they never brought it up.

But that was before he’d started coming to her room, before he’d shared himself with her. She couldn’t let him hurt on his own any longer.

“Are you okay? I worry about you, you know,” Fela said.

Elodin froze where he was holding the music box. He held it motionless for a few seconds, then set it back down on her desk.

“No,” he said, his back facing her. The sing-song was gone from his voice. “Sometimes, the whole world is in my head, and I can’t find myself in it. How can I? I am just one small man in the great wide world.”

When he turned to her, his eyes glittered with tears.

“Oh, dearheart,” she said. She opened her arms, the way she had that night months ago on the steps of the Mews. He came to her and sat down next to her on the bed, the mattress sinking with his weight.

“The world is so much more than we know. We tinker with alchemy and sygaldry, but what are we? We are pissants in the midst of the namers and the shapers. To know your own insignificance, to see the world and comprehend your place in it . . .”

He shuddered and shook his head, as though he could clear away whatever was bothering him. Fela wrapped one arm around his shoulders and he leaned into her. He dropped his head against her neck, his breath hot on her skin.

“I hate that you’re hurting,” she said, and he choked back a wild sob.

“I can see the fabric of the world—the threads of creation. Everything, every tiny speck of dust, is older than we can imagine. It has a life of its own, as old as time itself.” 

She knew what his words said, but she didn’t understand their meaning. She couldn’t—she didn’t know the names of things, not like Elodin. She hadn’t seen the world the way he had. But it clearly hurt him so, and it scared her that her Master Namer had been so shaken by whatever he’d found.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

He sighed into her neck.

“I—” he said. He sounded tired, so tired she wondered how she’d never noticed before. She wondered if he was always this exhausted behind the madness—if it burned so bright it took all of his energy, like a fever. “You are a stone in the sea in a storm, under the wind and waves and lightning. And when it all clears, the stone is still there.”

Fela let her hand slide down his back, and she took his hand between both of hers. She gently uncurled his tight fist, then kneaded his palms. She worked into the muscles at the base of his thumb and over his graceful fingers.

“You are solid,” he went on. “The patterns are always moving. As soon as I figure out how they flow and fit together, they change. Except you—you are still there.”

She didn’t understand that, either, but she knew it wasn’t crazy, just deep. So she bent down to unlace his other shoe, then took both of them off. She took off his one sock. Then she laid him back on her bed, rolling him to face the wall, and got in behind him.

She didn’t know what to do to help him, so she just held him. She pressed her body against his back, her arm draped over his side to rest over his pounding heart. She nuzzled the back of his neck with her nose, her breath brushing his hair in a steady rhythm.

She didn’t try to fix him. This wasn’t a storybook, and she didn’t think there was a cure: going to find the sacred spring or the healer faerie. She didn’t think there was a magic potion or a special herb that would turn him back into the old Elodin, the brilliant but sane one, the full arcanist at eighteen, the youngest Chancellor ever.

He was what he was. He was brilliant and he was mad and right now he hurt, and she just held him until the beating of his heart slowed and his chest rose and fell softly in sleep.

It was the first time he’d ever stayed the whole night with her. The first few moments of waking up with him pressed warm against her were a pleasant surprise, but worry overtook her when she remembered the night before. He was still asleep, and Fela looked him over, stubble on his cheeks and jaw and his dark hair messy on her pillow. A frown creased between his eyebrows, as if whatever had upset him the night before had followed him into his dreams.

As though he felt her watching him, he woke. He blinked a few times, and the sleepiness left his dark eyes as he realized where he was.

“Good morning,” she said, smiling at him.

“Good morning,” Elodin said, although he didn’t smile in return.

He sat up, and Fela moved so he could get out of bed. He didn’t say anything about the night before and so she didn’t, either, but she touched his back for comfort as he bent down to put his one sock and both shoes back on.

Rather than going out the window, Fela checked to make sure the halls of the Mews were empty, and he slipped into the main hub as she went out the back door of the women’s wing. When she saw him in class a few hours later, he had shaved and changed his clothes, and his lecture was perfectly coherent.

* * *

Elodin was more able to talk about himself those nights they lay in bed, in the blanket of darkness. Sometimes they opened the window to let the breeze in, though they were careful not to talk too loud.

“How old are you?” Fela asked him as she curled against his chest.

He’d come through her window half an hour before, and they hadn’t even taken off their clothes. They’d spent the whole time lying on her bed, and he’d covered her with his weight and slow, burning kisses until she felt lightheaded and smothered in her nightgown.

“A hundred and eight,” Elodin said. His voice was solemn, but she could see the corners of his impish grin. “I fell into the Fae when I was twelve and stayed seventy-five years. I was eighty-eight when I came to the University.”

“That explains some things,” she laughed. 

“Thirty-four,” he said after a moment, and she knew he was telling the truth. It suited him. Sometimes he looked like a little boy when he was happy, and sometimes he looked a thousand years old in his eyes. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.” 

“Just over a span of years apart—not bad. Not like one of the old barons of the Small Kingdoms. He married a beautiful, 18-year-old princess on his 99th birthday.”

Fela scoffed. 

“Of course, he was very rich,” Elodin said thoughtfully. “But then again, they had twelve children, so the sex couldn’t have been too bad.”

Fela reached up under his shirt and ran her nails lightly down his side for telling such a ridiculous story. He squirmed and twisted away from her.

“Some people said his arcanist was very gifted with certain potions. Some people said,” his voice took on a scandalous tone, and he paused to nip at her ear. “Some people said his wife knew the name of his penis.” 

Fela threw her head back on the pillow and laughed. 

“There’s no such thing,” she said. 

“Is that so?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Do _you_ know the name of your penis?” she challenged him.

“Of course,” he said promptly. “I know the names of all things. After I called the wind and the fire, I found the name of all men’s pizzles in Hemme’s class. But that was the trouble, you see—he didn’t have one.”

She laughed again.

“Well, then, we’ll see just how well you’ve taught me naming,” she said.

She sat up on her knees and tugged at the hem of his shirt. He scrambled out of it and she tossed it on the floor. Then she unbuttoned his pants, and he lifted his hips so she could pull them off.

Fela propped herself on her elbows and spent an entire minute relaxing her eyes and trying to find a name. It didn’t come. 

So she cheated and used her hands and her mouth.

Elodin’s laugh turned into a groan halfway through. Modegan courtesans were renowned, and although Fela’s mother had never let her talk to one, she didn’t want to reflect badly on her homeland.

After a few moments, when his length jumped in her hand, Fela shifted so she could watch him. All of the parts of him were beautiful, like one of her sculptures: the line of his throat as his head rolled back on the pillow, the contrast of his dark eyelashes against his face as his eyes fluttered closed, the way his mouth parted. His belly tensed when she flicked her tongue over him, and she put a hand on the ridge of his hip to keep him down. 

She worked him over, enjoying the weight of him in her mouth, the smoothness of him against her lips, the feel of his thighs flexing beneath her.

And for once, Master Namer had no words.

“Why me?” she asked a few minutes later, when his breathing had slowed and she’d crawled back up the bed to tuck herself against him.

She thought he might have fallen asleep, but he started stroking her hair. 

“Hmm?” he said, and she felt his chest vibrate more than heard him.

“Why did you pick me?” she asked. “You came to the Fishery that day and told me to sculpt you a whistle in the wind. I didn’t even know you knew my name.”

“Of course I knew your name. How could I not? Fela, the most beautiful woman at the University. Every bunk in the Mews is covered in spunk from the boys thinking about you at night. You smiled at me once when I agreed to teach you naming, and I nearly pissed myself.”

She swatted his arm, even as she blushed.

“Of course I noticed you, Fela,” Elodin said, more seriously this time. “Do you remember your first admissions interview? I asked you if five spades had been played and you had three in your hand, how many spades was that?” 

She nodded. 

“You said eight. And then you paused, and you said, ‘I think.’” 

“I remember,” she said. “I thought I had to be missing something—it seemed like such an easy question. What is the right answer, anyway?”

“Eight.”

Of course. She’d thought it might have been some profound test, some riddle out of a storybook. But of course not.

“Then why ask?” she said. 

“Nothing about naming can be tested. Not like alchemy or sygaldry or mathematics. It isn’t a matter of how much you know or how much you remember. I’ve always told Herma it’s useless for me to even show up to admissions.” 

He stretched, shifting her, and she took a moment to settle back in. 

“Every time I ask that question, people say eight and look at me like I’m an idiot. No one ever stops to wonder if maybe there’s more to the question, if they’re not seeing it correctly. I’ve had El’thes look at me like I’m a halfwit. 

“But you, Fela, did what everyone else could not. You were wise enough to take what you heard and listen to what was actually said, and _that_ is what makes you a namer.” 

“But I didn’t even want to study naming,” she said. “Why not teach Kvothe?” They fell silent for a moment, and Fela remembered fiery hair and a green cloak with many pockets. “I’m not smart—not like he was. He was here three terms and he made Re’lar. And I know he asked you to teach him.”

Elodin sighed.

“Kvothe was smart, yes. He was smart enough that he didn’t have to try. Not yet. And so when he found something that didn’t yield to him immediately, he turned away. He came to me and all he spoke of was naming—but when I didn’t take him right away, he gave up and went to Kilvin.”

He traced a hand over her, down her side and over her hip, his hand then wandering back up under her nightgown. He was in lecture mode, teaching her. But not like his lectures in class, questioning and sharp and confusing—like he taught when it was just the two of them and he patiently answered her questions.

“The boy was brilliant, God rest his soul, but he didn’t know what it meant to work for something—to not know, but to know that he could figure it out in time. Not like you, Fela,” he went on. “You are patient. You are smart, but you also work, and you persevere. You are steady in the face of uncertainty.”

“Because I am like the stone,” Fela said.

He’d told her these things all this time, in different ways with different words, and she finally understood him. Elodin understood that she was happy finding the beauty in a hundred sympathy lamps, each one a little different, while Kvothe did the most complicated projects he could to impress Kilvin. He understood that she’d been content to spend her nights alone, while Simmon chased every woman at the University and each short-lived affair ended in hot words and misunderstandings. Elodin thought of her the way she thought about herself—and now she realized they’d been saying the same thing all along.

“Because you are like the stone,” he agreed. “Kvothe was wind and fire: he was hot and bright and fierce. But eventually, even the wind must stop, and the fire will die—and if that had happened to Kvothe, he would have been left a shadow of himself and not known how to put himself back together.”

Fela’s mind went from poor Kvothe to Elodin. He had called wind and fire first, he’d said, like Kvothe. He’d said he was impatient, too. She wondered if he had burned himself out and had struggled to put himself back together. She wondered if that restlessness, that wanderlust, had led him to whatever had happened that day in the alchemy lab.

She would find out someday. He would keep opening himself up to her. When he was ready, he would tell her. 

“But the stone is not these things. It does not burn a town or tear down a forest, but it endures, unchanging. And so you are like the stone, Fela. You will not burn out—you will be a hundred years old and still be everything you are now, and more.”

Warmth washed over her. She grabbed the hand that was running over her stomach and squeezed it, then tipped her head up and kissed the side of his neck. She spread soft kisses up and over where his throat bobbed when he swallowed. She found Elodin’s mouth with hers, and lingered a moment before sitting up.

He finally pulled her nightgown off as she straddled him. He looked at her with open desire, and when they were both ready, she sank onto him.

It was deep this time and she took all of him. Elodin watched her with a quiet intensity that would have scared her if she hadn’t known him so well.

She caught a last glimpse of his face, something glinting in his dark eyes, before her back arched and her eyes fluttered shut and she bit her lip to keep from calling out his name. A sense of accomplishment coursed through her as he trembled beneath her and then lay there, limp.

“My God, you are enough to make me a young man again. Twice in half an hour,” he said, grinning up at her.

“You were on your back both times. It was hardly work,” Fela said. “Besides, you are not old. In Modeg, a man keeps going until he dies.” 

“Then I’ll have to go to Modeg when I stop teaching,” he joked.

Maybe someday, he would. Maybe someday, there would be more—she would take him to visit her parents’ home, and they could sit in the library and walk through the gardens. Maybe when she got her guilder and wasn’t his student anymore, they could meet openly; she could share his bed and call out his name the way he made her want to. Maybe they could travel to all four corners of civilization and he could teach her the names of things.

But for now, this was enough. It was enough to watch him in class, to smile at his antics and see his deeper purpose while he confused the other students. It was enough to have private lessons and enjoy his whimsy. It was enough to have him in secret, a kiss out and about when they were lucky, and this, lying in bed every few days.

Elodin’s hand dropped from her waist and settled on her thigh. He always touched her, as if making sure she was really there and not some figment of his imagination. Fela looked down at him again, laid out before her. He was lovely—his hair dark against her pillow, cheeks flushed, eyes bright.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That I love you,” she said.

She wasn’t good at big speeches. Someone else would have written a love song, would have painted, would have grown a rose garden. But Fela wasn’t a princess in a faerie story—she did geometry and made sympathy lamps.

But from the way Elodin’s face lit up, the boyish grin that stretched his mouth, he knew what she meant. He heard the music she didn’t play, read the poems she didn’t write, picked up the white handkerchief she hadn’t dropped. 

“Fela with her heart of stone,” he said.

And Fela knew that he understood her: he knew that she had never needed old naming magic and storybook heroes to escape from the pain and disappointment in the world. She hadn’t needed Elodin to rescue her from everyday drudgery in the Archives and the Fishery. She’d found her own meaning in the crinkled pages of the books she shelved and the shades of blue in her pieces of glass.

But he’d come into her life anyway, one little step at a time. Lying here with him now, Elodin the man—the real man, ribald and affectionate and brilliant and cracked—meant so much more to her than Elodin the story, the odd Master Namer who could command things with his voice like Taborlin the Great. And he knew that—he knew that she saw him for what he was, and loved him for it. 

For Elodin knew the names of all things, and so all things he understood: wind and water, fire and lightning, and Fela with her heart of stone.


End file.
